From SWOT to SOAR
I was thinking about that Oprah show over the weekend, and Marcus Buckingham’s career advice about not trying to fix your weaknesses, and instead focusing on your strengths.
His core message brought to mind something I’ve read recently about the SWOT analysis. It’s a rudimentary business planning tool, straight out of the introductory class at your local MBA school. For the street smart among you that never came across this in a text book, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal to the person, group, or organization being examined, and Opportunities and Threats are external.
There’s a new version gaining popularity called SOAR. It’s Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results, totally dumping the review of Weaknesses and Threats altogether.
The reason why it’s getting more attention is because, rather than spending half your time trying to fix weak spots, you could spend all your time amplifying your strengths. Why try to understand the web analytics of your marketing campaign, when you can hire someone for your team to do it? Then you can use your creative strengths to construct the next campaign, for example. If you’re not a numbers person, don’t try to be. Get someone on your team who is.
There’s another business parallel here, too. If you think of your revenue as your strength, and your expenses as your weakness (they cut into your profit, after all), you see that you can only grow so much by cutting your expenses. Eventually, you won’t be able to cut anymore – there’s only so much you can do on the weakness side.
The only way to truly grow, as far and wide as you want, will be on the revenue side. The side of strength.
Consider this in your resume as well. Cutting expenses by large dollar amounts or percentages is certainly worthwhile, but is it as impressive as creating revenue? Again, there’s only so much you can cut, and after that, your usefulness sort of plateaus.
If you can show a potential employer you can shower them with new streams of revenue, again and again, you’re more likely to stand out from the crowd.
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