Assignment: Essentials of Strategic Management
Superior Strategy Execution-Another Path to Competitive Advantage-
1
Which of the following is not one of the principal managerial components associated with implementing and executing strategy?
A)
Adopting an organizational structure that supports strategies intended to create customer value.
B)
Ensuring that policies and procedures facilitate rather than impede strategy execution.
C)
Staffing the organization with people having the right skills and expertise.
D)
Reducing the layers of management to a bare minimum and making sure employees are empowered.
E)
Instilling a corporate culture that promotes good strategy execution.
2
The overriding aim in building a management team should be to _______________
A)
assemble a critical mass of talented managers who can function as agents of change and further the cause of first-rate strategy execution.
B)
select people who are charismatic and good communicators.
C)
choose managers who have substantial experience in the industry.
D)
assemble a team of people who believe in the same leadership approaches and use the same approaches to people management.
E)
choose managers who have the same core values and ethical standards.
3
Recruiting and retaining capable employees _______________
A)
is usually much more important to good strategy execution than is assembling a capable top management team.
B)
is easily the most critical aspect in building competitively valuable core competencies and capabilities.
C)
is more easily done by large multinational corporations because of their deep financial resources and stimulating job assignments.
D)
is largely a function of the skills and capabilities of the company's human resources staff.
E)
is important because the quality of an organization's people is always an essential ingredient of successful strategy execution-knowledgeable, engaged employees are a company's best source of creative ideas for the nuts-and-bolts operating improvements that lead to operating excellence.
4
Which of the following is generally not among the practices that companies use to staff jobs with the best people they can find, particularly if intellectual capital greatly aids good strategy execution?
A)
Providing promising employees with challenging, interesting, and skill-stretching assignments.
B)
Striving to retain talented, high-performing employees via promotions, salary increases, performance bonuses, stock options and equity ownership, fringe benefit packages, and other perks.
C)
Fostering a stimulating and engaging work environment such that employees will consider the company a great place to work.
D)
Coaching average performers to improve their skills and capabilities, while weeding out underperformers.
E)
Hiring only people below the age of 35 who have college degrees and a grade point average of B or better.
5
The rationale for making strategy-critical value chain activities the primary building blocks in a company's organizational scheme is based on _______________
A)
the contribution it makes to improving labor productivity and reducing labor costs.
B)
the benefits of keeping the layers of management to a minimum.
C)
the thesis that if activities crucial to strategic success are to have the resources, decision-making influence, and organizational impact they need, they have to be centerpieces in the organizational scheme.
D)
the benefit of keeping the organization structure simple and easy for employees to understand.
E)
making it easier to capture the benefits of centralized decision making.
6
Which one of the following falsely describes a centralized approach to decision making?
A)
Little discretionary authority is granted to frontline supervisors and rank-and-file employees.
B)
Hierarchical command-and-control structures speed an organization's responses to changing conditions because top-level managers are in a position to quickly review the situation and make a final decision.
C)
Tight control by a few senior managers makes it easy to fix accountability when things do not go well.
D)
There is an assumption that frontline personnel have neither the time nor the inclination to direct and properly control the work they are performing, and that they lack the knowledge and judgment to make wise decisions about how best to do their work.
E)
Top executives retain authority for most strategic and operating decisions.
7
A change in strategy nearly always entails budget reallocations because _______________
A)
new strategic initiatives can be costly or capital intensive.
B)
units important in the prior strategy but having a lesser role in the new strategy may need downsizing while units and activities that now have a bigger and more critical strategic role may need more people, new equipment, additional facilities, and above-average increases in their operating budgets.
C)
the accompanying policy revisions and compensation incentives tend to require different levels of funding than before.
D)
of corresponding changes in the company's organizational structure and budgetary requirements.
E)
adopting best practices and pushing for continuous improvement tend to reduce costs and reduce overall resource requirements.
8
Prescribing policies and operating procedures aid the task of implementing strategy by _______________
A)
helping empower product champions and work teams.
B)
paving the way for instituting TQM or Six Sigma programs and adopting best practices.
C)
providing top-down guidance regarding how things need to be none, enforcing consistency in how activities are performed, and promoting the creation of a work climate that facilitates good strategy execution.
D)
helping prevent the corporate culture from being unhealthy and weak.
E)
pushing employees to accept the need for state-of-the-art operating and support systems.
9
Business process reengineering is a tool for _______________
A)
remodeling and refreshing a strategy-critical core competence.
B)
pulling the pieces of strategy-critical activities out of different departments and unifying their performance in a single department or cross-functional work.
C)
reducing the size of a company's managerial bureaucracy.
D)
boosting the quality of a company's product and the caliber of its customer service.
E)
expediting the development of an important new competitive capability.
10
Total quality management (TQM) _______________
A)
is a philosophy of managing that involves convincing employees that superior product quality is the most reliable key to competitive success in the marketplace.
B)
is a tool for providing customers with the highest quality product of any company in the industry.
C)
involves managing company operations in a manner calculated to quickly and efficiently make quantum gains in the quality and effectiveness with which production activities are performed.
D)
is a philosophy of managing a set of business practices that emphasizes continuous improvement in all phases of operations, 100 percent accuracy in performing tasks, involvement and empowerment of employees at all levels, team-based work design, benchmarking, and total customer satisfaction.
E)
involves managing company operations in a manner calculated to result in mistake-free management of a company's entire business.
11
Six Sigma quality control _______________
A)
is a tool that is superior to TQM in achieving top-notch quality in manufacturing a product.
B)
consists of a disciplined, statistics-based system aimed at producing not more than 2.5 defects per million iterations.
C)
is based on three principles: (1) all work is a process; (2) all processes have variability; and (3) all processes create data that explain variability.
D)
is the best practice for managing manufacturing and assembly activities.
E)
is a disciplined, statistics-based approach to manufacturing or assembling a product and results in 5 defects per million iterations when implemented properly.
12
Company strategies and value creating processes can't be effectively executed without internal operating systems that include:
A)
PCs, servers, web applications, and e-business solutions.
B)
TQM, reengineering, and Six Sigma programs.
C)
customer data, employee data, supplier/partner data, operations data, and financial performance data.
D)
benchmarking and best practices.
E)
All of these.
13
Management's most powerful tool for mobilizing employee commitment to competent strategy execution and operating excellence is _______________
A)
total quality management.
B)
business process reengineering.
C)
a properly designed reward structure.
D)
making the company a great place to work in terms of pay scales, fringe benefits, and employee perks.
E)
effective screening of job applicants such that only the most motivated and energetic people are hired.
14
Which of the following is not characteristic of a compensation and reward system designed to help drive successful strategy execution?
A)
Making the performance payoff a major, not minor, piece of the total compensation package.
B)
Keeping performance incentives and bonuses to less than 15 percent of total compensation.
C)
Not skirting the system to find ways to reward effort rather than results.
D)
Having incentives that extend to all managers and all workers and generously rewarding people who turn in outstanding performances.
E)
Making sure the time between achieving the target performance outcome and the payment of the reward is as short as possible.
15
Which of the following is not an important nonmonetary approach to enhancing motivation and helping drive successful strategy execution?
A)
Adopting promotion from within policies and acting on suggestions from employees.
B)
Providing attractive perks and fringe benefits.
C)
Creating a work atmosphere in which there is genuine sincerity, caring, and mutual respect among employees and management.
D)
Providing rank-and-file employees with representation on the company's board of directors.
E)
Using frequent words of praise to recognize employees for commendable performance.
16
Which one of the following is not something that shapes and helps define a company's culture?
A)
The core values, beliefs, business principles, and traditions that permeate the workplace.
B)
The work practices and behaviors that define "how we do things around here": The company's standards of what is ethically acceptable and what is not, along with the legends and stories that people repeat to illustrate and reinforce the company's core values, traditions, and business practices.
C)
A company's approach to people management and its style of operating.
D)
The strategy and business model that the company has adopted.
E)
The "chemistry" that permeates its work environment.
17
Which of the following is not one of the five types of unhealthy company cultures?
A)
Bureaucratic cultures.
B)
Change-resistant cultures.
C)
Unethical and greed-driven cultures.
D)
Politicized cultures.
E)
Insular, inwardly focused cultures.
18
The hallmarks of a high-performance corporate culture include _______________
A)
a shared willingness to adapt core values and ethical standards to fit the changing requirements of an evolving strategy, use of a balanced scorecard approach to tracking company performance, and a gung-ho approach to discovering best practices.
B)
considerable political infighting that typically consumes a great deal of organizational energy, often with the result that what's best for the company takes a backseat to political maneuvering.
C)
a "can-do" spirit, pride in doing things right, no-excuses accountability, and a pervasive results-oriented work climate where people go the extra mile to meet or beat stretch objectives.
D)
charismatic managerial leadership, a lean management bureaucracy, and a must-be-invented-here mind set.
E)
strong inclinations to adopt a wait-and-see posture, carefully analyze several alternative responses, learn from the missteps of early movers, and then move forward cautiously and conservatively with initiatives that are deemed safe.
19
When trying to change a problem culture, management should undertake such steps as _______________
A)
selecting a team of rank-and-file employees to lead the culture change effort.
B)
hosting company outings to help build camaraderie among employees and support for the culture change.
C)
drawing up an action plan to change the present culture and then persuading company personnel why this plan of action is good and will be successful.
D)
conducting an employee survey to determine the organization's cultural norms and what company personnel like and dislike about the current culture.
E)
identifying which aspects of the present culture are supportive of good strategy execution and which ones are not.
20
Which one of the following is not a means of building and strengthening competitively valuable resources and capabilities?
A)
engaging in experience-building activities such as collaborative efforts in R&D engineering and design.
B)
acquiring capabilities through mergers and acquisitions.
C)
shifting from decentralized to centralized decision making so as to give senior executives more authority and control in driving cultural change.
D)
entering into collaborative partnerships with suppliers, competitors or other companies that possess needed expertise.
E)
none of the above.