An organization’s history is fundamental to its future. What can be achieved tomorrow depends on what one has today, and what one has today is the total of everything that has been built up, and held on to, in the past. This is true even for new ventures when the entrepreneur brings experience and credibility for creating the new business.
Over the course of time, when the causes of performance are not understood, organizations make poor choices about their future. They embark on plans that cannot be achieved and fail to assemble what they need in order to achieve. The catalog of failed initiatives, in every sector, would make a thick book indeed. These failures are costly not only in terms of money but also in terms of wasted and damaged human potential. However, organizations should realize that they are capable of far more than they imagine, if only they choose objectives well and piece together the necessary elements.

Improving an organization’s performance is not just a matter of the top management. Challenges may be focused on an individual department or the whole organization. They may even range from very small to truly huge, and they may call for urgent measures or a long-term approach. 
Managing performance through time is universal problem. To help resolve the problem, the tools fall into several categories:

• simple principles catering to wide interpretation, such as vision statements and strategic planning.
• substantial changes to business configurations, such as outsourcing and re-engineering.
• approaches to performance control, such as value-based management and the balanced scorecard.
• problem-solving methods, such as five forces, real options, and customer segmentation.

Assessing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the organization, is a method widely used by managers to evaluate their strategy. The concepts are ambiguous, qualitative, and fact-free. Discovering the strength of great products and an opportunity for strong market growth offers no help whatsoever in deciding what to do, when, and how much to bring about what rate of likely growth in profits.
Opportunities and threats are features of the external environment. They are better dealt with by considering industry forces and political, economic, social, and technological (PEST) analysis. On the other hand, strengths and weaknesses center on the firm itself, so they are related to the resource-based view (RBV) of strategic management.