Essentials of Strategic Management.Ch10
Essentials of Strategic Management.Ch10
Question
Superior Strategy Execution—Another Path to Competitive
Advantage- Ch10
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) light control by a few senior managers
makes it easy to fix accountability when things do not go well.
D) There is an assumpton 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.
Advantage- Ch10
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) light control by a few senior managers
makes it easy to fix accountability when things do not go well.
D) There is an assumpton 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.
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