A competitive environment where there is strong rivalry among sellers, low entry
barriers, strong competition from substitute products, and considerable bargaining
leverage on the part of both suppliers and customers:
A. is competitively unattractive from the standpoint of earning good profits.
B. offers little ability to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
C. is highly conducive to achieving strong product differentiation and high customer
loyalty to the company’s brand.
D. offers moderate to good prospects for making a reasonable profit and building a
sustainable competitive advantage.
E. requires that industry members have a strongly differentiated product offering in
order to be profitable.
Answer:
Breaking down resistance to a new strategic vision typically requires that management,
on an as needed basis:
A. institute a balanced scorecard approach to measuring company performance, with
the “balance” including a mixture of both old and new performance measures.
B. inform company personnel about forthcoming changes in the company’s strategy.
C. reiterate the company’s need for the new direction, while addressing employee
concerns head-on, calming fears, lifting spirits, and providing them with updates and
progress reports as events unfold.
D. explain all updates and merits of the company’s business model to align strategy with
employee concerns.
E. raise wages and salaries to win the support of company personnel for the company’s
new direction.
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT an integral part of transforming core values and ethical
standards into cultural norms?
A. Instituting procedures for enforcing ethical standards
B. Immediately dismissing any employee caught violating the company’s code of ethics
or disregarding core values
C. Screening out job applicants who do not exhibit compatible character traits
D. Periodically having ceremonial occasions to recognize individuals and groups who
display the values and ethical principles
E. Having senior executives frequently reiterate the importance and role of company
values and ethical principles at company events and internal communications to
employees
Answer:
Merely fine-tuning the execution of a company’s existing strategy normally requires :
A. big shifts of resources from one area to another.
B. a larger allocation of resources to the effort.
C. trimming costs and shifting resources to activities that have a higher priority.
D. creativity in finding ways for cost reductions, i.e. ways to do less with less.
E. cost-cutting in key value chain activities.
Answer:
The primary role of a functional strategy is to:
A. unify the company’s various operating-level strategies.
B. specify how to build and strengthen the skills, expertise, and competencies needed to
execute operating-level strategies successfully.
C. support and add power to the corporate-level strategy.
D. create compatible degrees of strategic intent among a company’s different business
functions.
E. determine how to support particular activities in ways that support the overall
business strategy and competitive approach.
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT an accurate statement as concerns competing in the
markets of foreign countries?
A. Localizing a global company’s product offerings country-by-country leads to
low-cost advantage.
B. There are country-to-country differences in consumer buying habits and buyer tastes
and preferences.
C. A company must contend with fluctuating exchange rates and country-to-country
variations in host government restrictions and requirements.
D. Product designs suitable for one country are often inappropriate in another.
E. Market growth rates vary from country to country.
Answer:
Entering into strategic alliances and collaborative partnerships can be competitively
valuable because:
A. working closely with outsiders is essential in developing new technologies and new
products in virtually every industry.
B. cooperative arrangements with other companies are very helpful in racing against
rivals to build a strong global presence and/or racing to seize opportunities on the
frontiers of advancing technology.
C. they represent highly effective ways to achieve low-cost leadership and capture
first-mover advantages.
D. they are a powerful way for companies to build loyalty and goodwill among
customers with diverse needs and expectations.
E. they are quite effective in helping a company transfer the risks of threatening
external developments to other companies.
Answer:
Enlisting employees’ sustained and energetic commitment to good strategy execution
and achievement of the strategic priorities and financial objectives is best done by:
A. having top executives commit to making employees the company’s most valuable
competitive asset.
B. developing core competencies in the use of TQM, Six Sigma programs, and business
process reengineering.
C. resourceful and effective use of motivational incentives, both monetary and
nonmonetary.
D. clever and innovative use of benchmarking and best practices.
E. providing employees with a high degree of job security and attractive perks.
Answer:
Strategic group map analysis does NOT entail drawing conclusions about:
A. where on the map is the best place to be and why.
B. which companies/strategic groups are destined to prosper because of their positions.
C. which companies/strategic groups seem destined to struggle.
D. what accounts for why some parts of the map are better than others.
E. where on the map is the easiest position to shift from to a more favorably situated
position.
Answer:
Market maneuvering among industry rivals:
A. determines whether the industry’s strategic group map will be static or dynamic.
B. centers around collaborative efforts to overcome the bargaining power of powerful
suppliers and powerful buyers.
C. is usually an industry’s strongest driving force.
D. is usually one of the two or three weakest competitive forces because of the close
familiarity that rivals have for one another’s likely next moves.
E. is ongoing and dynamic, with moves and countermoves of rivals producing a
continually evolving competitive landscape that delivers winners and losers.
Answer:
A key approach for a company to grow sales and profits in several country markets is
to:
A. transfer its valuable competencies and resource strengths among these markets to aid
in the development of broader competencies and capabilities.
B. employ a multidomestic strategy rather than a global strategy.
C. locate technical after-sale services close to buyers.
D. minimize transportation costs among these markets.
E. take advantage of less restrictive restrictions and requirements of host governments.
Answer:
Which of the following statements about a company’s strategy is true?
A. A company’s strategy is mostly hidden to outside view and is deliberately kept under
wraps by top-level managers (so as to catch rival companies by surprise when the
strategy is launched).
B. A company’s strategy is typically planned well in advance and usually deviates little
from the planned set of actions and business approaches because of the risks of making
on-the-spot changes.
C. A company’s strategy generally changes very little over time unless a newly
appointed CEO decides to take the company in a new direction with a new strategy.
D. A company’s strategy is typically a blend of proactive and reactive strategy elements.
E. A company’s strategy is developed mostly on the fly because of the constant efforts
of managers to come up with fresh moves to keep the company’s product offering
clearly different and set apart from the product offerings of rival companies.
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT accurate as concerns the task of identifying the strategic
issues and problems that merit front-burner managerial attention?
A. It entails drawing upon the results and conclusions from analyzing the company’s
external environment.
B. It entails drawing on the results and conclusions from evaluating the company’s own
resources and competitive position.
C. It entails developing a “worry list” of “how to…,” “whether to…,” and “what to do
about…”
D. Identifying the strategic issues and problems that the company faces is the first thing
that company managers need to do before starting to analyze the company’s internal and
external environment.
E. Developing a list of issues and problems that management need to address (and to
resolve) should always precede deciding upon a strategy and what actions to take to
improve the company’s position and prospects.
Answer:
Not all buyers of an industry’s product have equal degrees of bargaining power with
sellers, because:
A. sellers in an industry provide similar products and generally their cost structures are
different because of competitive advantages in their operation.
B. some sellers may be less sensitive than others to price, quality, or service differences.
C. along the various stages of the value chain sellers are conducive to earning attractive
profits.
D. the industry is a highly cohesive structure with limited fragmentation and few
industry members.
E. sellers are large and few in number relative to the number of buyers.
Answer:
The risks of strategic alliances often include all of the following EXCEPT:
A. conflicting objectives and strategies.
B. deep differences of opinion about how to proceed operationally and strategically.
C. important differences in corporate values.
D. misunderstandings about appropriate ethical standards.
E. potential for royalty from trustworthy firms.
Answer:
Which of the following is unlikely to be a primary building block in a company’s
organizational structure?
A. Functional departments
B. Process and operations departments
C. Empowered employee departments
D. Divisional units performing major processing steps
E. Geographic organizational units
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT among the principal managerial tasks associated with
managing the strategy execution process?
A. Ensuring that policies and procedures facilitate rather than impede effective
execution
B. Creating a company culture and work climate conducive to successful strategy
implementation and execution
C. Surveying employees’ opinions on how costs can be reduced and how employee
morale and job satisfaction can be improved
D. Exerting the internal leadership needed to drive implementation forward and keep
improving on how the strategy is being executed
E. Motivating people and tying rewards and incentives directly to the achievement of
performance objectives and good strategy execution
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT a typical strategic objective or benefit that drives
mergers and acquisitions?
A. To gain quick access to new technologies or other resources and capabilities
B. To create a more cost-efficient operation out of the combined companies
C. To expand a company’s geographic coverage
D. To facilitate a company’s shift from a broad differentiation strategy to a focused
differentiation strategy
E. To extend a company’s business into new product categories
Answer:
A weighted industry attractiveness assessment is generally analytically superior to an
unweighted assessment because:
A. a weighted ranking identifies which industries offer the best/worst long-term profit
prospects.
B. an unweighted ranking doesn’t discriminate between strong and weak industry
driving forces and industry competitive forces.
C. it does a more accurate job of singling out which industry key success factors are the
most important.
D. an unweighted ranking doesn’t help identify which industries have the easiest and
hardest value chains to execute.
E. the various measures of attractiveness are not likely to be equally important in
determining overall attractiveness.
Answer:
Resource and capability analysis is achieved by:
A. probing the caliber of a firm’s competitive assets relative to those of rival firms.
B. attaining price stability.
C. analyzing only internal strengths and weaknesses through a matrix comparison
model.
D. cost-benefit analysis of the company’s core product sales.
E. performing resource-specific activities within the organization to allocate available
capital.
Answer:
A core competence:
A. detracts from a company’s arsenal of competitive capabilities and competitive assets
and is not a resource strength considered to be genuine.
B. is typically results-based, residing in a company’s tangible physical assets on the
balance sheet.
C. is often grounded in a single department’s set of knowledge and expertise.
D. is an activity that a firm performs proficiently that is also central to its strategy and
competitive success.
E. is a proficiently performed external activity.
Answer:
The broad areas that internal information business systems need to cover include all of
the following EXCEPT:
A. financial performance data.
B. corporate culture data.
C. customer data.
D. operations data.
E. employee data.
Answer:
When strategies fail, it is often because of:
A. poor execution of the strategy.
B. shortfalls exposed with the strategic management design process.
C. inadequate support for the management team responsible for the planning process.
D. secondary operating practices that hinder the required changes.
E. lack of sufficient information about operating systems.
Answer:
Business strategy, as distinct from corporate strategy, is chiefly concerned with:
A. deciding what new businesses to enter, which existing businesses to get out of, and
which existing business to remain in.
B. deciding how to build competitive advantage and improve performance in a
particular line of business.
C. making sure the strategic intent of a particular business is in step with the company’s
overall strategic intent and strategy.
D. coordinating the competitive approaches of a company’s different business units.
E. what business model to employ in each of the company’s different businesses.
Answer:
A related diversification strategy involves building the company around businesses:
A. with strategic fit with respect to key value chain activities and competitive assets.
B. that are highly independent, proficient, and efficient operating firms.
C. with strategic fit across separate value chain activities that drive each business.
D. that can also include unrelated businesses with dissimilar resource requirements.
E. that have dissimilar value chain activities with no cross-business commonalities.
Answer:
Business process reengineering is a tool for:
A. expediting the redesign of existing products and shortening the design-to-market
cycle.
B. radically redesigning and streamlining how an activity (workflow) is performed, by
pulling the pieces of strategy-critical activities out of different departments and unifying
their performance in a single department or cross-functional work group.
C. instituting total quality management.
D. making the most effective use of Six Sigma techniques.
E. the rapid redesign of an organization’s structure so as to quickly create organizational
competencies and capabilities.
Answer:
The primary operating strategies are concerned with:
A. what the firm’s operating departments are doing and plan to do to unify the
company’s functional and business strategies.
B. the specific plans for building competitive advantage in each major department and
operating unit.
C. how to manage initiatives of strategic significance within each functional area, and
adding detail and completeness in ways that support functional strategies and the
overall business strategy.
D. how best to carry out the company’s corporate strategy.
E. how best to implement and execute the company’s different business-level strategies.
Answer:
At companies where executives believe in the merits of practicing the values and ethical
principles that have been espoused, the:
A. executives have usually personally written the statement of core values and the code
of ethics.
B. company’s pursuit of higher profits is tempered, so that the company will not come
across to customers and the general public as greedy.
C. company’s chances for strategic success and market leadership are substantially
reduced because company personnel are hesitant to engage in business practices that are
unethical.
D. stated core values and ethical principles are the foundation of the corporate culture.
E. core values and ethical standards are made a prominent and visible part of the
company’s strategic intent and strategy.
Answer:
Implementing and executing a company’s strategy:
A. is primarily the job of the company’s board of directors since they direct the actions
and policies of the top senior executives in executing the strategy.
B. is a task for every manager and the whole management team, but ultimate
responsibility for success or failure falls upon the top senior executives, especially the
chief executive officer of the company.
C. is primarily a responsibility of all company personnel because all personnel are
active participants in the strategy execution process and their actions have a huge
impact on the ultimate outcome.
D. should be delegated to a chief strategy implementer appointed by the chief executive
officer.
E. is primarily a task for middle and lower-level managers because it is they who have
responsibility for pushing the needed changes all the way down to the lowest levels of
the organization.
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT one of the leadership roles that senior managers have to
play in pushing for good strategy execution and operating excellence?
A. Learning the obstacles in the path of good execution and clearing the way for
progress
B. Being out in the field, seeing how well operations are going
C. Being out front personally, leading the execution process and driving the pace of
progress
D. Weeding out managers who are consistently in the ranks of the lowest performers
(the bottom 10 percent) and who are not enthusiastic about the strategy or how it is
being executed
E. Delegating authority to middle and lower-level managers and creating a sense of
empowerment among employees to move the implementation process forward
Answer:
Quantitative measures of a company’s competitive strength:
A. signal which competitor has the most distinctive competencies and which competitor
has the fewest.
B. provide useful indicators of how a company compares against key rivals, factor by
factor and capability by capabilitythus indicating whether the company has a net overall
competitive advantage or disadvantage against each rival.
C. reveal which competitors are in the best and worst strategic groups.
D. show which industry rival has the best overall market opportunities and which
competitor has the poorest market opportunities.
E. pinpoint which industry rival is subject to the least amount of competitive pressures
from the five competitive forces.
Answer:
Which of the following is NOT a potential advantage of backward vertical integration?
A. Reduced vulnerability to powerful suppliers (who may be inclined to raise prices at
every opportunity)
B. Reduced risks of disruptions in obtaining crucial components or support services
C. Reduced costs
D. Reduced business risk because of controlling a bigger portion of the overall industry
value chain
E. Increase in a company’s differentiation capabilities and perhaps achieving a
differentiation-based competitive advantage
Answer:
Why do companies decide to enter a foreign market?
A. To capture economies of scale in product development, manufacturing, or marketing
B. To raise input costs through greater pooled purchasing power
C. To decrease the rate at which they accumulate experience and move up the learning
curve
D. To concentrate risk within a broader base of countries, especially when sales are
down in one area and the company can undermine sales elsewhere
E. To exploit the natural resources found within its home market
Answer:
Identify and explain three actions that top executives can take to help instill a spirit of
high achievement into the corporate culture and mobilize organizational energy behind
the drive for good strategy execution and operating excellence.
Answer:
Under what circumstances is it advantageous for a company competing in foreign
markets to concentrate its value chain activities in a select few locations?
Answer:
Apart from “the business of business is business, not ethics” kind of thinking, there are
three other primary factors that contribute to a drive toward unethical business behavior.
Identify and explain the three factors.
Answer:
Who has strategy execution responsibility and who is ultimately responsible for making
sure that the task of implementing and executing the strategy goes well?
Answer:
An automobile company with an established brand name uses a unique assembly line
method to reduce the final packaging and fitting procedures cost. It then sells the cars to
all customers at a reduced price. Which of the five generic strategies automobile
company using?
Answer:
There are a number of offensive strategy options for improving market positions using
cost-based and blue-ocean type strategies. Define the terms and suggest ways in which
the strategies could be operationalized.
Answer:
What is the meaning of the term “balanced scorecard”? What are the merits of using a
balanced scorecard in judging a company’s performance?
Answer:
What is the analytical value of studying competitors and trying to predict what moves
rivals will make next?
Answer:
Explain why an organization needs a strategic vision. What purpose does a strategic
vision serve?
Answer:
Which is the better approach to diversificationa strategy of related diversification or a
strategy of unrelated diversification? Explain and support your answer.
Answer:
Identify and briefly discuss four steps that managers can take to change a culture that is
out of step with the company’s strategy.
Answer:
Why does it make sense to create some job anxiety, insecurity, and stress as part of a
company’s motivational and reward scheme for promoting competent strategy
execution?
Answer:
Draw the five forces model of competition and briefly describe the relevance of each of
the five forces in determining the overall strength of competitive pressures a company
faces. Which of the five competitive forces is typically the strongest?
Answer:
Identify and briefly discuss the key features that can be used to describe the corporate
culture of a company.
Answer:
Instead of entering into an alliance or partnership, Smith Limited opts to merge with
Design Limited. What are the reasons for preferring a merger to an alliance or
partnership? Explain the other organizational mechanisms that are also preferable to
alliances.
Answer:
Identify the five good reasons (actions) companies can choose in crafting social
responsibility initiatives, environmental sustainability, and a good corporate citizenship
strategy.
Answer:
What are the distinctive features of a best-cost provider strategy? Under what
circumstances is a best-cost provider strategy appealing?
Answer:
In conducting a SWOT analysis, is it enough to simply compile lists of the company’s
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Why or why not?
Answer:
Company strategies cannot be implemented or executed well without a number of
real-time state-of-the-art support and control information systems to carry out business
operations. Discuss the benefits of real-time systems by industry.
Answer:
Isabelle is in the process of setting financial and strategic objectives for her marketing
company. She realizes she needs to add short-term and longer-term performance targets.
Is it important to include short-term and long-term objectives at this stage? Which one
is more important? Explain.
Answer: