Crafting and executing strategy-Thompson , Strickland, Gamble, Peterae,Janes & Sutton-
1 Which one of the following is not helpful in identifying the components of a single-business company's strategy?
A) The company's moves to respond to changing conditions in its macro-environment and in industry and competitive conditions
B) The scope of the company's geographic coverage
C) The company's resource strengths and weaknesses
D) The company's key functional strategies
E) The company's planned, proactive moves to outcompete rivals and its efforts to build competitive advantage
2 SWOT analysis
A) consists of three steps identifying a company's resource strengths and weaknesses and its opportunities and threats, drawing conclusions about the company's overall situation, and translating the conclusions into strategic actions to improve the company's strategy and business prospects.
B) provides a quick overview of where on the scale from "alarmingly weak" to "exceptionally strong" the attractiveness of the company's overall business situation ranks.
C) helps provide a basis for matching the company's strategy to its internal resource capabilities and its external opportunities and threats.
D) helps identify a company's core competencies and competitive capabilities and the seriousness of its resource weaknesses and competitive deficiencies.
E) All of these.
3 A core competence
A) is a more durable company resource than a "distinctive competence."
B) usually resides in a company's technology and physical assets (state-of-the-art plants and equipment, attractive real estate locations, modern distribution facilities, and so on) whereas a company competence usually resides in a company's human assets.
C) is typically knowledge-based, residing in people and in a company's intellectual capital and not in its assets on the balance sheet; moreover, a core competence tends to be grounded in cross-department combinations of knowledge and expertise rather than being the product of a single department or work group.
D) is usually tied closely to the caliber of a company's manufacturing capability and/or its proprietary technology and know-how.
E) is better suited to helping a company defend against external threats than in pursuing external market opportunities.
4 Which of the following analytical tools are particularly useful for determining whether a company's prices and costs are competitive?
A) SWOT analysis, strategy assessment, activity-based costing analysis, and key success factor analysis.
B) SWOT analysis, competitive strength assessment, best practices analysis, and value chain analysis.
C) Value chain analysis and benchmarking.
D) Competitive position assessment, competitive strength assessment, strategic group mapping, SWOT analysis, and value chain analysis.
E) SWOT analysis, best practices analysis, activity-based costing analysis, and competitive strength assessment.
5 A company's value chain consists of
A) the activities a company performs in converting its resource weaknesses into resource strengths.
B) the collection of activities it performs in the course of designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product or service and delivering value to customers-these activities can be grouped into (a) the primary activities that are foremost in creating value for customers and (b) the related support activities that facilitate and enhance the performance of the primary activities.
C) those activities a company performs that represent "best practices"-only best practice activities are capable of delivering value to customers and thus qualify to be part of a company's value chain.
D) the activities that a company performs in developing a distinctive competence.
E) the activities that represent a company's competencies, core competencies, distinctive competencies, and competitive capabilities-it is these activities that underpin a company's efforts to create value for customers and shareholders.
6 Benchmarking
A) is inherently unethical if it involves companies that are direct competitors because it involves gathering competitively sensitive information about the operations and costs of rivals.
B) is not a valid tool for measuring the cost-effectiveness of an activity unless it is restricted to companies in the same industry.
C) is a potent tool for improving a company's own internal activities that is based on learning how other companies perform them and borrowing "best practices".
D) loses much of its managerial usefulness if it is done with the aid of third-party organizations who insist on protecting the confidentiality of individual company data; moreover, benchmarking is not used very often by companies because of "borderline" ethical considerations and because most of the time the information and data used in doing benchmarking studies has turned out to be unreliable and untrustworthy.
E) entails calculating the costs of performing each of the primary and related support activities in a company's value chain.
7 A company's cost competitiveness is largely a function of
A) whether it does a good enough job of benchmarking its value chain activities against the value chains of competitors so that it knows exactly how low to drive its costs to be cost-competitive.
B) how efficiently it manages its overall value chain activities relative to how efficiently competitors manage theirs.
C) whether it does a better job of building its resource strengths more cost effectively than rivals.
D) whether it possesses more core competencies and competitive capabilities than rivals.
E) how closely its internally-performed activities are linked to the activities performed by suppliers and to the activities performed by forward channel allies.
8 For a company to translate performance of value chain activities into competitive advantage, it
A) must (1) develop core competencies and maybe a distinctive competence that rivals don't have or can't quite match and that are instrumental in helping it deliver attractive value to customers or (2) be more cost efficient in how it performs value chain activities such that it has a low-cost advantage.
B) has to develop more core competencies than rivals.
C) must be more adept than rivals in using benchmarking and activity-based costing.
D) has to position itself in the strategic group where profit margins are highest.
E) must adopt more best practices than rival firms.
9 Doing a weighted competitive strength assessment of how a company compares against key rivals involves
A) developing a list of 6 to 10 telling measures of competitive strength and then assigning weights to each of these strength measures that reflects their relative importance.
B) rating each company on each strength measure (using a scale of 1 to 10) and then multiplying the strength rating by the assigned weight to get a weighted strength score.
C) summing each company's weighted strength scores on the various strength measures to get an overall measure of competitive strength for each competitor.
D) drawing conclusions about the size of a company's net competitive advantage or disadvantage vis-à-vis its rivals (with the size of the advantage/disadvantage being indicated by the sizes of the differences among the companies' competitive strength scores).
E) All of the above.
10 Which one of the following is not something that can be learned from doing a competitive strength assessment?
A) Identifying the competitive factors where a company is strongest and weakest vis-à-vis key rivals and the kinds of offensive/defensive actions the company can use to exploit its competitive strengths and reduce its competitive vulnerabilities
B) Whether a company utilizes more best practices than rivals in performing its value chain activities
C) Which of the rated companies is competitively strongest and what size competitive advantage it enjoys
D) Whether a company has a net competitive advantage or is a net competitive disadvantage relative to key rivals (with the size of the advantage/disadvantage being indicated by the differences among the companies' competitive strength scores)
E) Which rival company is competitively weakest and the areas where it is most vulnerable to competitive attack-when a company has important competitive strengths in areas where one or more rivals are weak, it makes sense to consider offensive moves to exploit rivals' competitive weaknesses.