Essay On Turning Potential Threats Into Opportunities

During the process of strategic planning, a manager will have to face numerous threats. A threat can be termed as anything that can affect the company’s performance and create hurdles in its success. These forces have to be outside to be considered a threat, as it is much easier to control the inside factors that affect the company’s performance, given the power a manager has over inside factors. Usually, the analysis of threat includes at how to avoid them. Following are the ways for a manager to act, when faced with a threat:

Reducing the impact of threat on the company.

Working on contingency plans.
Detecting the threat early.
Apart from that, another way to respond to a threat would be to see the threat as an opportunity. The companies who usually perceive threats as opportunities deal with the threats in the most productive way and move their competitive position to a much stronger point.
A perfect example of advantages of seeing threats as opportunities is the success of Charles Schwab. In the field of mutual funds, when the concept was new to the brokerage firm, most of the firms viewed them as a threat. Charles Schwab, on the other hand, saw that threat as an opportunity and decided to partner with the mutual firms families of the time. As a result, his customers were able to buy mutual funds directly through Schwab without having to open multiple accounts for broker funds and brokerage. The firms that chose not to work in mutual funds, seeing them as a threat, made their own mutual fund families while Schwab’s strategy helped his company become a huge success and a financial powerhouse.

References

Frigo, Mark L, and Richard J Anderson. Strategic Risk Management. Montvale, N.J.: IMA, 2010. Print.
Locke, Justin. 'Turning Threats Into Opportunities'. Advisorperspectives.com. N.p., 2011. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
Strategyletter.com,. 'Turn Your Threats Into Opportunities'. N.p., 2015. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.