Harvard Business School

Kenneth R. Andrews talks about the SWOT model in a 2003 interview with Jeffrey Cruikshank:

I had worked with Ed Learned at Ad Prac. Ed was an administrator. You know, he created marketing, and he created this, and he created that, without having any special personal command of the subject. And he could spot talent, and he knew when his heart was in the right place, and he was a good person to work for. He brought me to the school, actually, which was a radical notion on his part, but I guess it worked out alright. When Chris then succeeded Ed, he set to work in earnest to try to develop a conceptual framework for the course. So he and Bruce Scott developed the idea of strategy. I didn’t like that, because, as I told you before, I guess, the military implications, and things of that sort. But I got used to it. And we developed a case book in 1965, which was called Business Policy Text and Cases. The text was a radical innovation. There had been dozens of case books before that, many of which Chris had presided over very meticulously, as he did the writing of cases. This was one of the things he was a master of. And he got to work with Bruce Scott on a famous series of cases about a chocolate bar company. What was it called? It doesn’t matter. That meant that Bruce Scott spent six months on one little company — one lousy little company, but really produced some fantastic materials that introduced the human equation into policy.

In the meantime, Jack Glover had conceived the idea of the giant case, like Hilton Hotels, in which you ended up with 2,000 pages of material, and you had a series, and you could use part of it, or all of it. A lot of these influences were sort of intersecting. In order then to effect a transformation from let’s have a conceptual structure in which we say, “You’ve got to know what your objectives are,” we got to the point of, “How do you conceive of your objectives? What do you do?” So then — and I guess I was more responsible for this, in terms of just writing it down. The idea of a company’s having objectives had four components. And they were largely — they’re partly personal, and partly economic. One was: what is the market for what it is you can do? What are the possibilities? And also what are the future possibilities different from what you’re now doing? Second, what is the particular — it’s now called core competence. What is the particular strength? What are the strengths and weaknesses? And Stevens did a thesis on trying to find how you determine a company’s strengths and weaknesses, and found it was very difficult. But the idea that you put together a market opportunity with what your company could do, what its present capabilities were, and how they could be extended. Third, what did you want these goals to be? Because if you were doing something you wanted to do, you probably would be more successful than if you didn’t. We couldn’t prove that, but that was the kind of notion.