Strategy educators have employed SWOT analysis for decades as a means of teaching strategy formulation to students. Despite this well-established practice, many scholars and practitioners have called for discontinuing it as a pedagogical tool for several reasons, including that traditional undergraduate students may lack the practical experience to employ SWOT correctly, the framework presents “messy” strategic problems as overly rational, or it represents as an ambiguous and/or atheoretical classification system. We suggest possible remedies for SWOT analysis problems that may help improve its usefulness and promote its continued use. After briefly reviewing its original formulation, current textbook descriptions, and frequent criticisms, we present a refined and enhanced SWOT framework, anchored in extant strategy research and learning theory. We then demonstrate the efficacy of this enhanced framework with examples and preliminary data. Our fundamental conclusion is that SWOT analysis, when properly employed, remains a useful overarching framework that, among other advantages, helps bridge the “theory versus practice” pedagogical debate on how best to teach strategy formulation.

几十年来，战略教育者一直采用 SWOT 分析作为向学生教授战略制定的手段。尽管有这种行之有效的做法，但许多学者和从业者出于多种原因呼吁停止将其作为教学工具，包括传统本科生可能缺乏正确使用 SWOT 的实践经验，该框架将“混乱”的战略问题呈现为过于理性，或者它代表一个模棱两可的和/或无理论的分类系统。我们为 SWOT 分析问题提出了可能的补救措施，这可能有助于提高其实用性并促进其继续使用。在简要回顾其原始表述、当前教科书描述和频繁批评之后，我们提出了一个基于现有战略研究和学习理论的精炼和增强的 SWOT 框架。然后，我们通过示例和初步数据证明了这个增强框架的功效。我们的基本结论是，SWOT 分析如果使用得当，仍然是一个有用的总体框架，除其他优点外，它有助于弥合关于如何最好地教授战略制定的“理论与实践”教学辩论。