MGM Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College SWOT Analysis Discussion Replies

Responses to Other Students: Respond to at least two of your fellow classmates with at least a 100-word reply about his or her Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening. To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:

• What did you learn from your classmate’s posting?
• What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?
• What clarification do you need regarding the posting?
• What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates’ postings?

First student: Clark Peterson

This course was very informative and the material discussed is one reason I chose to pursue a Business Degree. My previous career was in the food industry, as I have worked in all aspects of the industry. This class has enabled me to reflect back on those times and view them with a different perspective, as our corporate strategies were always changing. Although at the time I understood what the trends were and the impact the economy played on our direction, I now have a better realization of how such decisions and strategies were developed.

The most compelling topic was how intricate a SWOTT analysis is, as it requires gathering a lot of knowledge about what a company does well and not so well, and how current trends impact the corporate strategy. Understanding these strengths and weaknesses given the current trends allows a company to develop a plan based on opportunities that are presented with the idea of positive growth. I found the initial video interesting as well; specifically, how the SWOTT was broken down into a table for better analysis.

The discussion debates helped further advancement of considerations, as both sides needed to be considered. Writing a discussion post about one thought, and then having to argue the opposite view enabled a well-rounded perspective. Additionally, this debate forced considerations of all aspects of the SWOTT and not just a one-sided perspective. As such, when conducting a future SWOTT, consideration of all aspects must be considered so that the best strategy can be developed. Moreover, this helped to reduce confirmation biases as research needed to be done both for and against. Reading other’s posts on both sides of the debate we equally informational as well, as several varying ideas were presented.

The way that the class was designed and presented was very well planned. Intellipath helped guide the concepts throughout, and the zoom lectures were very helpful as well. Although my schedule didn’t allow for me to attend live, I was able to review the archived lectures each week. The way that this class guided discussion, and used an ever changing industry as an example, made understanding the information easy. One thing that may help going forward, would be to find a more updated SWOTT analysis given our current economic situation. As we know, COVID has made a tremendous impact on how businesses need to shift, and the impact that it had on the food industry as whole would be interesting to analyze.

Second Student: Jasmine Parlow

There are many aspects of this class and understanding each topic will better my managerial career personally. I have heard of the SWOTT analysis before but I have never had to look at it in detail the way we did in this class here. Understanding strengths and weaknesses within the internal of the company betters business, profits, and employee relations. I know we looked at fast food businesses in this class but I could relate to my personal business and seeing strengths and weaknesses within my own ideas and thoughts for my future goals. I know that a weakness could be turned into a strength by changing your point-of-view. A weakness I have in my business is a lack of time management to gain customer satisfaction and return customers. A strength is my personal experience with my products and wanting to talk about the love and beauty I feel and see from using my products. A challenge for me is to use my personal experience to start a conversation in my every-day life (i.e. Shopping, gas station, beauty salon, water park, out to eat, bowling, at my full-time job, etc.). This change will make more time to grow my clients anywhere I go. If I talk about my products outside of work, that will limit the time I have to spend actually going out of my way to promote my products.

The debate idea helped me see and understand others’ points-of-view as well as the topic’s other side. I am a very close-minded person and I have a hard time seeing other sides to about anything. This class was helpful in both the research part of my paper, opening my mind to articles to better understand why something is the way it is. On the other hand, reading my peers posts about the other side of the debate is eye-opening to me. I can better understand the topic at hand when I see someone else enthusiastically for or against the opposing side I stated. I like the debate because it is not an argument but an open door to see another point-of-view.

I liked the Intellepath aspect as I always do because it flows well together, the topics and what we discussed in the chats. I was not able to attend the live chats due to my work schedule but it is beneficial to review archived chats to better understand what is needed in the assignments.

I would suggest gathering a class data in the beginning of the week for a favorable time to have a live help session (Question and answer session). If you, as a professor, have time for 30 min to help answer questions students may have after a day or two from the live chat. Gather students’ best times for attending a question-and-answer session if there can be. If a live chat is on Tuesday, maybe Wed., Thu. Evening or a Friday morning would be beneficial to answer any last-minute questions live before submitting their assignment on Friday before the weekend. I have had issues contacting instructors because of the million ways of contact these days. Everyone uses some different form of contact. I do not have the time or capacity to get to an assignment, not understand something, send an email, and wait 48 hours for a response. By that time, I have lost my train of thought, what my misunderstanding was, how to start where I left off… Online schooling is so difficult when you have a question on an assignment and you cannot get answers right away. There isn’t much you can do online to fix that problem and I understand we all have other lives going on outside of class. But for a professor to be vigilant in answering questions is my hardest thing to get over being in school online.