Strategic Planning
Pre-Test Questions
Course Introduction
Strategic Planning is a comprehensive course designed to equip students with the frameworks, tools, and analytical skills necessary to formulate, implement, and evaluate organizational strategy in dynamic environments. The course explores key concepts such as vision and mission development, environmental scanning, SWOT analysis, setting strategic objectives, and monitoring performance. Through case studies, group projects, and simulations, students learn to align resources with organizational goals, anticipate competitive challenges, and make informed decisions that drive long-term success. The curriculum emphasizes both theoretical foundations and practical applications to prepare future leaders for strategic roles in various sectors.
Recommended Textbook
Crafting and Executing Strategy Concepts and Cases 21st Edition by Thompson
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2
Chapter 1: What Is Strategy and Why Is It Important
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Q1) A company achieves a competitive advantage when it
A) provides buyers with superior value compared to rival sellers or offers the same value at a lower cost.
B) has a profitable business model.
C) is able to maximize shareholder wealth.
D) is consistently able to achieve both its strategic and financial objectives.
E) has a strategy well-matched to its business model.
Answer: A
Q2) Which of the following is NOT typically a trigger to an evolving strategy?
A) the need to keep strategy in step with changing circumstances, market conditions, and changing customer needs and expectations
B) the proactive efforts of company managers to fine-tune and improve one or more pieces of the strategy
C) the need to abandon some strategy features that are no longer working well
D) the need to respond to the newly initiated actions and competitive moves of rival firms
E) the need to respond to short-term swings in the stock market
Answer: E
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Chapter 2: Leading the Process of Crafting and Executing Strategy
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Q1) Identify and explain four actions that top executives can take that are key elements in directing organizational action and building capabilities behind the drive for good strategy execution to meet or beat performance targets.
Answer: Management's action agenda for executing the chosen strategy emerges from assessing what the company will have to do to achieve the targeted financial and strategic performance. In most situations, managing the strategy execution process includes the following principal aspects:
- Creating a strategy-supporting structure.
- Staffing the organization to obtain needed skills and expertise.
- Developing and strengthening strategy-supporting resources and capabilities.
- Allocating ample resources to the activities critical to strategic success.
- Ensuring that policies and procedures facilitate effective strategy execution.
- Organizing the work effort along the lines of best practice.
- Installing information and operating systems that enable company personnel to perform essential activities.
- Motivating people and tying rewards directly to the achievement of performance objectives.
- Creating a company culture conducive to successful strategy execution.
-Exerting the internal leadership needed to propel implementation forward.
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Chapter 3: Evaluating a Companys External Environment
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Q1) The concept of strategic groups is relevant to industry and competitive analysis because
A) firms in the same strategic groups are rarely close competitors-a firm's closest competitors are usually in distant strategic groups.
B) strategic group maps help identify how each competing firm is positioned and the relationship to their closest competitors.
C) competition grows in intensity as the number and diversity of the strategic groups in an industry increases.
D) the profit potential of firms in the same strategic group is usually very similar.
E) competitive pressures tend to be weaker within strategic groups than across strategic groups.
Answer: B
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Chapter 4: Evaluating a Companys Resources and Competitive Position
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Q1) Imitation by rivals is most challenging when A) resources are unique.
B) resources must be built over time.
C) capabilities reflect a high level of social complexity and causal ambiguity.
D) resources and capabilities require a high level of capital investment.
E) resources are primarily intangible.
Q2) Activity-based costing
A) is an accounting system that assigns a company's expenses to whichever activity in a company's value chain is responsible for creating the cost.
B) involves using benchmarking techniques to develop cost estimates for the value chain activities of each major rival.
C) is a powerful tool for identifying the different pieces of a company's value chain and classifying them as primary activities and support activities.
D) involves determining which value chain activities represent variable costs and which represent fixed costs.
E) is a tool for identifying the activities that cause a company's product to be strongly differentiated from the products of rivals.
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Chapter 5: The Five Generic Competitive Strategies: Which
One to Employ
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Q1) Which one of the five generic competitive strategies is most likely to be best suited for an industry whose product is a commodity? Explain.
Q2) A low-cost provider strategy can defeat a differentiation strategy when A) sellers are not charging a price premium.
B) many rivals are pursuing a similar differentiation approach.
C) a company can offset thinner profit margins per unit by selling enough additional units to increase total profits.
D) there are few ways to differentiate a product or a service and many buyers perceive these differences valuable.
E) customers are basically satisfied and don't think extra attributes are worth a higher price features.
Q3) What market conditions and circumstances make a low-cost provider strategy attractive? What are the pitfalls in pursuing a low-cost provider strategy? What can go wrong?
Q4) What are the distinctive features of a best-cost provider strategy? Under what circumstances is a best-cost provider strategy appealing?
Q5) What are the keys to sustaining a focused low-cost strategy?
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Chapter 6: Supplementing the Chosen Competitive
Strategy: Other Important Business Strategy Choices
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Q1) What are the merits of strategic alliances and collaborative partnerships for companies racing to seize opportunities in an industry of the future? Under what circumstances do they make sense? How do they contribute to competitive advantage?
Q2) Companies racing against rivals for global market leadership need strategic alliances and collaborative partnerships with companies in foreign countries to A) combat the bargaining power of foreign suppliers and help defend against the competitive threat of substitute products produced by foreign rivals.
B) help raise needed financial capital from foreign banks and use the brand names of their partners to make sales to foreign buyers.
C) get into critical country markets quickly, gain inside knowledge about unfamiliar markets and cultures, and access valuable skills and competencies that are concentrated in particular geographic locations.
D) help wage price wars against foreign competitors.
E) exercise better control over efforts to revamp the global industry value chain.
Q3) What are the general strategic objectives of merger and acquisition strategies?
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Chapter 7: Strategies for Competing in Foreign Markets
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Q1) Companies operating in an international marketplace have to respond to all of the following, EXCEPT
A) whether to customize their offerings in each different country market to match the tastes and preferences of local buyers.
B) whether to pursue a strategy of offering a mostly standardized product worldwide.
C) how much to customize their offerings in each different country market to match the tastes and preferences of local buyers.
D) the tensions between market pressures to localize a company's product offerings country by country and the competitive pressures to lower costs through greater product customization.
E) whether to buy a struggling competitor at a bargain price or pay a premium to gain entry to the local market.
Q2) Under what circumstances is it advantageous for a company competing in foreign markets to disperse certain value chain activities across many countries?
Q3) Compare and contrast the advantages for entering and competing in foreign markets for the strategic options of exporting, licensing, and franchising.
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Chapter 8: Diversification: Strategies for Managing a Group of Businesses
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Q1) A company that is already diversified may choose to broaden its business scope by building positions in new related or unrelated businesses because of all of the following EXCEPT
A) it has resources or capabilities that are eminently transferable to other related or complementary businesses.
B) the company's growth is sluggish and it wants the sales and profit boost that a new business can provide.
C) management wants to lessen the company's vulnerability to seasonal or recessionary influences or to threats from emerging new technologies, legislative regulations, and new product innovations that alter buyer preferences and resource requirements.
D) it wants to make new acquisitions to strengthen or complement some of its present businesses, market positioning, and competitive capabilities.
E) its top management wants to increase its compensation.
Q2) Identify and briefly discuss each of the three options for entering new businesses. What are the driving choice parameters for entry into new businesses and which one is the most popular in the sense of being used most frequently?
Q3) Explain the difference between a cash cow business and a cash hog business.
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Chapter 9: Ethical Business Strategies, Social Responsibility, and
Environmental Sustainabil
ITY
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Q1) The strength of the beliefs underlying ethical universalism is that A) ethical universalism recognizes significant variation in basic moral standards according to local cultural beliefs, local religious beliefs, and social mores. B) ethical standards are objectively determined by religious and moral experts. C) what is deemed right or wrong, fair or unfair, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical is (or should be) grounded in religious doctrine and applied strictly to all business situations.
D) it draws upon the collective views of multiple societies and cultures to put some clear boundaries on what constitutes ethical business behavior and what constitutes unethical business behavior no matter what country or culture a company is operating in.
E) it leaves room for thinking that concepts of right and wrong can be varying shades of gray.
Q2) Explain the difference between ethical universalism and integrated social contracts theory. Which school of thought is most inclusive? Explain the reasons for your answer.
Q3) Does a high correlation exist between a company's social responsibility and its competitive advantage and financial performance?
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Chapter 10: Building an Organization Capable of Good
Strategy Execution
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Q1) A firm's organizational structure is comprised of
A) resource strengths and competitive capabilities that allow it to incorporate attributes at lower costs than rivals whose products have similar attributes. B) the formal and informal arrangement of tasks, responsibilities, lines of authority, and reporting relationships by which the firm is administered.
C) excellent marketing and sales skills to convince buyers to pay a premium price for the attributes/features incorporated in its product.
D) sustainable distinctive competencies to ensure cost reduction and competitiveness. E) a number of independent functional units involved in some common undertaking, with one unit typically in a more central role.
Q2) Explain what is involved in building capabilities internally. What steps are required? How much time does it take? How hard is it? Support your answer.
Q3) What is meant by empowerment of employees? How does it differ from delegation of authority? In what ways can empowerment of employees aid the cause of good strategy execution?
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Chapter 11: Managing Internal Operations: Actions That Promote
Good Strategy Execution
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Q1) Which of the following is NOT a method that company managers can use to promote operating excellence in performing value chain activities?
A) Utilize benchmarking.
B) Adapt best practices.
C) Install TQM and/or Six Sigma quality control techniques.
D) Undertake business process reengineering.
E) Adopt standard industry techniques.
Q2) 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.
Q3) What is the potential long-term payoff of total quality management (TQM)?
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Chapter 12: Corporate Culture and Leadership: Keys to Good Strategy Execution
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Q1) Which of the following is NOT a substantive culture-changing action that a company's managers can undertake to alter a problem culture?
A) Promoting individuals who are known to possess the desired cultural traits, who have stepped forward to advocate the shift to a different culture, and who can serve as role models for the desired cultural behavior
B) Appointing outsiders with the desired cultural attributes to high-profile positions
C) Screening all candidates for new positions carefully, and hiring only those who appear to fit in with the new culture
D) Urging company personnel to search outside the company for work practices and operating approaches that may be an improvement over what the company is presently doing, and paying sizable bonuses to those employees who identify practices that the company ends up adopting
E) Designing compensation incentives that boost the pay of teams and individuals who display the desired cultural behaviors and hitting change-resisters in the pocketbook
Q2) What are the five traits of unhealthy cultures?
Q3) What are the distinctive features of high-performance corporate cultures?
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