Final Capstone Exam

Which of the following is the BEST example of related diversification?

A manufacturer of canned vegetables acquiring a producer bottled salad dressings

A manufacturer that ships goods made at its Brazilian plants to markets in foreign countries.......

views a weaker Brazilian real vis a vis the currencies o the countries to which it is exporting as a favorable exchange rate shift.

The process of first creating and then developing and strengthening capabilities internally...

requires first developing the ability to do something, however imperfectly or inefficiently; second translating this ability into a tried and try competence and or capability by learning to do the activity consistently well and at an acceptable cost; and then continuing to polish, refine and sharpen their performance of the competence or capability striving not just for ongoing improvements but, ultimately for best-in-industry or best-in-world proficiency.

The two major avenues for achieving a cost advantage over rivals include....

revamping the firm's value chain to eliminate or bypass some cost producing activities and doing a better job than rivals of performing value chain activities more cost effectively.

To profitably employ a best-cost provider strategy, a company must....

have the capability to incorporate upscale attributes (appealing features or functionality or quality, or satisfying customer service) into its product offering at a lower cost than rivals, putting the company in position to underprice rivals whose products have similar upscale attributes and still earn attractive profits.

Which one of the following does NOT affect the reject rates at a company's production facilities?

The S/Q Ratings of pairs being produced and the percentage use of superior materials.

A company's business model....

Consists of both a customer value proposition and a profit proposition.

Which of the following are factors in determining a company's credit rating?

Its debt-asset ratio, default risk ratio and interest coverage ratio.

Which of the following is/are NOT among the factors that affect worker productivity?

The S/Q ratings of the footwear being produced and whether the percentage of use of superior materials exceeds 60%

If a company spends $20 million to install new footwear-making equipment with capacity to produce 1 million pairs of athletic footwear at its North American production facility then its annual depreciation costs at that facility will rise by....

10% or $2,000,000

The projected growth in buyer demand for Branded athletic footwear is...

3-5% Annually in North America and Europe-Africa in years 16-20 and 7-9% annually in Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions in years 16-20

The difference between a core competence and a distinctive competence is that...

A core competence is an activity that a company performs quite well an that is also central to its strategy and competitiveness whereas a distinctive competence is a competitively important activity that a company performs better than its rivals.

Which of the following is the most important competitive factor in determining a company's ability to secure contracts to supply large multi-outlet retailers private label footwear to chain retailers in a particular geographic region?

The price at which the company offers to supply the retailers with private label pairs.

From the standpoint of promoting successful strategy execution, it is important that the firm's motivation and reward system.....

Accentuate positive rewards but also carry the risk of punishment for lackadaisical or indifferent effort and subpar performance.

Which one of the following is FALSE as concerns the merits o why being public spirited and devoting time and resources to social responsibility, initiatives, environmental sustainability, and good corporate citizenship is "good business?"

Acting in a socially responsible manner nearly always results in higher profits because the accompanying favorable publicity produces gains in revenues that are more than sufficient to cover the costs of it social responsibility strategy.

Which one of the following is NOT one of the steps in doing competitive strength assessment?

Assign equal weights to each competitive strength measure.

Which of the following is NOT one of the appeals of diversifying into unrelated businesses?

The relative case of growing shareholder value by capturing cross-business financial synergies that will quickly drive the company's overall financial performance to higher levels.

Which one of the following is NOT one of the principal offensive strategy options to improve a company's market position?

Building the industry's most cost-efficient supply chain and then using this cost advantage to overwhelm higher cost rivals with a deeply discounted price.

Which of the following is NOT something that is part of the leadership challenge in making corrective adjustments when a company's strategy or strategy execution effort is not delivering good results?

Choosing talented company personnel to get the causes of poor performance fixed quickly and then making sure they are generously rewarded for their success.

Which one of the following is NOT characteristic of an adaptive culture?

Company personnel are strongly attached to traditional policies, procedures, operating methods and ways of doing things, but are generally quite willing to shift to different strategies in order to go on he offensive to outcompete key rivals.

The factors that affect a company's S/Q rating by the International Footwear Federation include:

Current and cumulative spending for TQM/Six Sigma quality control programs; expenditures for best practices training, and expenditures for new styling/features per model.

Which one of the following should NOT be considered a company resource?

Core competences and distinctive competences and such achievements as low overall costs relative to competitors, market share leadership, and award winning product design.

Once a company has diversified into a collection of related or unrelated businesses and concludes that some strategy adjustments are needed, which one of the following is NOT one of the main options that the company can pursue?

Craft new initiatives to more strongly differentiate the various products/services in each of the company's businesses and thereby enhance the competitive power and reputation of the company's brand name.

The primary roles/obligations of a company's board of directors in the strategy-making strategy-executing process include....

Critically appraising the company's direction, strategy, and business approaches and evaluating the caliber of senior executives' strategy-making and strategy-executing skills.

Which one of the following statements about backward vertical integration is false?

What makes backward vertical integration such an attractive strategic option is the opportunity to substantially lower costs, capture the profit margins of suppliers and thereby increase the company's own profitability.

Which one of the following is NOT a way to grow a company's sales volume in the internet segment in the Europe-Africa region?

Deliver online orders for branded footwear within 2-3 business days instead of the standard 5-7 business days.

Which of the following is NOT an integral part of driving forces analysis?

Determining whether the driving forces are acting to cause one or more industry rivals to shift to a different strategic group.

Which one of the following is NOT part of the task of checking a diversified company's business line-up for adequate resource fit?

Determining which business units have value chain match-ups that offer opportunities to transfer competitively valuable resources/capabilities from one business to another and which business lack such opportunities (and therefore have inadequate resource fit).

Which of the following is NOT among the principal managerial components of the strategy execution process?

Doing an effective job empowering employees.

Which one of the following is NOT one of the steps company managers should take when trying to fix a problem culture?

Drawing up an action plan to change the present culture, explaining to company personnel why this plan of action is good and will be successful, and then having all company vote whether to accept or reject the plan-the plan has to be changed until a majority vote for the pan occurs.

The pitfalls of a differentiation strategy do NOT include...

Failing to emphasize and aggressively pursue the use of more value drivers than other rivals employing a broad differentiation strategy.

Broad differentiation strategies generally work best in market circumstances where...

Few rival firms are following a similar differentiation approach.

Which of the following statements about a high performance culture is FALSE?

High performance cultures exhibit strong preference for employing strategies that are likely to result in big profit increases, thereby enabling most company personnel to qualify for generous bonuses.

Which one of the following is NOT a way for a company to build competitive advantage by pursuing a multinational diversification strategy?

Fully capturing both cross business financial resource fits and cross-country financial resource fits

Which of the following is NOT a reason why companies might use outsourcing to improve performance of strategy-critical activities?

Greater flexibility in introducing new and improved products, lower payroll costs (because the company has fewer employees), greater ability to centralize decision-making, and increased ability to make strategy-critical activities the main building blocks in the company's organizational structure.

Which one of the following is NOT a benefit of prescribing policies and operating procedures to aid management's task of implementing and executing strategy?

Helping building employee commitment to adopting best practices and using the tools of TQM, Six Sigma and business process re-engineering to improve the performance of value chain activities.

In the private-label operating benchmarks section on Page 7 of each issue of the FIR, the industry-low, industry-average and industry-high benchmarks for the margins over direct costs (as explained in the HELP section for this same page) should be interpreted as representing....

How much sellers of private-label footwear received over and above the costs per pair sold; these margins, if positive, serve to improve a seller's operating profit in the designated region.

Which of the following statements about best practices is FALSE?

Implementing the use of a best practice involves radically redesigning and streamlining how an activity is performed with the intent of achieving quantum improvements in performance.

Which of the following is NOT one of the potential benefits of outsourcing certain value chain activities presently performed in-house?

Improving a company's ability to employ offensive strategies.

Which one of the following actions is GUARANTEED to result in lower labor costs per pair produced at one of your company's production facilities?

Increasing total employee compensation by 4% and realizing a 6% increase in production worker productivity

Using domestic plants as a production base for exporting goods to selected foreign country markets.....

Is an excellent initial strategy for testing the merits of competing internationally because it allows a company to minimize the amount of capital needed to begin selling in foreign markets and use a portion of its existing production capacity to make goods for export.

Good Competitive Intelligence about rivals' strategies, their financial performance, their competitive strengths and weaknesses, the actions and plans they have announced and the thinking and leadership styles of their executives is valuable because...

It enables a company to predict or anticipate what important actions rivals are likely to take next to be ready with defensive countermoves and to take rivals probable actions into account in crafting its own best course of action

Which of the following currencies is NOT involved in causing favorable or unfavorable exchange rate adjustments to your company's costs and revenues?

Japanese Yen

Which one of the following is NOT a good example of a defensive strategy to protect a company's market share and competitive position?

Launching a blue ocean strategy and/or preemptive strike strategy to discourage rivals from being aggressive.

Which one of the following is NOT among the penalties or costs that companies commonly incur when they are found to have engaged in ethical wrongdoing?

Lost profits owning to weakened ability to drive hard bargains with key suppliers and/or large volume customers.

Which of the following is NOT a recommended guideline for designing an effective incentive compensation system?

Making generous across-the-board wage and salary increases for all company personnel the cornerstone of monetary rewards and having a reward system that consists of at least 50% of non-monetary rewards and incentives.

It is reasonable for a company's management team to abandon efforts to win contracts to supply private-label footwear to chain retailers in a given year when....

Projections for the upcoming year indicate that buyer demand for its branded footwear across all 4 regions is strong enough to earn attractively high profits selling all of the branded pairs it can produce (including maximum use of overtime) at its existing production facilities.

The production benchmarks on page 6 if each issue of the Footwear Industry Report....

Provide valuable feedback to company managers regarding the efficiency with they are managing production labor costs, reject rates, and branded manufacturing costs per pair produced at each of their company's production facilities.

Which of the following is NOT one of the appeals or benefits of related diversification?

Related diversification is particularly well-suited for the use of offensive strategies, capturing competitively valuable financial fits, and capturing the many benefits of using coordinated competitive strategies in the company's various businesses.

The task of crafting diversified company's overall or corporate strategy does not involve which of the following tasks?

Revamping each business's value chain so as to reduce the differences in the activities performed across the company's various businesses and thereby lower overall costs, strengthen core competencies, and the chances or competitive success against rivals.

Which of the following statements about the rivalry among competing sellers is true?

Rivalry increases as the products of rival sellers become less differentiated and weakens as the products of industry rivals become more strongly differentiated.

Calculating quantitative attractiveness ratings for the industries a company has diversified into involves....

Selecting a set of industry attractiveness measures, weighting the importance of each measure, rating each industry on each attractiveness measure, multiplying the industry ratings by the assigned weight to obtain a weighted rating, adding the weighted rating for each industry to obtain a weighted overall industry attractiveness score and using the weighted overall industry attractiveness scores to evaluate attractiveness of all the industries, both individually and as a group.

Total Quality Management (TQM) emphasizes all but which one of the following?

Six Sigma accuracy in performing tasks

Which of the following most accurately describes your company's production operations?

Standard and superior matriels are sourced from outside suppliers at "base" prices that are currently $6 per pair for 100% use of standard materials and $12 per pair for 100% use of superior materials' however, these base prices can vary up or down according to the strength of global demand for footwear materials and the global percentage usage of standard versus superior materials

Which of the following best characterizes the task of leading the drive for good strategy execution and operating excellence?

Staying on top of how well things are going, putting constructive pressure on the organization to achieve good results, and pushing corrective actions to improve strategy execution and achieve the targeted results.

Which of the following are the 5 measures on which a company's performance is judged/scored?

Stock Price, Credit Rating, Earnings Per Share, ROE and Image Rating.

Which o the following statements about steering needed resources to execution-critical value chain activities is FALSE?

Strategy changes and new execution initiatives should normally be made without adding to total expenses.

Which one of the following is NOT one of the major drivers of unethical managerial behavior?

Strong motivations among business organizations to outcompete rivals and, hopefully, to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage over rivals.

The competitive pressures from substitute products tend to be stronger when.....

Substitutes are readily available and attractively priced, and have comparable or better performance features.

Which of the following statements concerning the strength of supplier bargaining power is false?

Supplier bargaining power is stronger when industry members are major customers and continuing to secure their business is important to suppliers well-being.

Based on the industry-low, industry-average and the industry-high values for the benchmarked data that appear on page 7 of each of the Footwear Industry Reports (FIR) which one of the following would be the strongest and most valid signal that one or more elements of a company's costs are too high relative to those of rival companies?

The company's cost per pair sold in the private-label segment in the Asia-Pacific region were close to the industry high.

A strategic group map displays...

The different market or competitive positions that rival firms occupy in an industry and helps identify each rival's closest competitors.

Which of the following statements about a strong-culture company is FALSE?

The hallmarks of a strong culture company are centralized decision-making, strict enforcement of company policies and dedicated pursuit of a bold strategic intent.

Determining whether an industry presents a company with good prospects for attractive profitability and growth entails such considerations as...

The industry's growth potential, the anticipated strength of competitive forces, whether industry profitability is expected to be favorably or unfavorably affected by the prevailing driving forces and the degrees of risk and uncertainty in the industry's future.

Which of the following statements about the task if crafting a company's strategy is most accurate?

The more that a company's operations cut across different products, industries, and geographical areas, the more that headquarters executives have little option but to delegate considerable strategy-making authority to down-the-line managers in charge of particular subsidiaries, divisions, product lines, geographic sales offices, distribution centers and plants.

Which of the following is NOT something that shapes the fundamental character of a company's corporate culture?

The nature and character of the actions the company is taking to improve the performance of the value chain activities.

Which one of the following statements regarding the task of staffing the organization in a manner that facilitates strategy execution is FALSE or INACCURATE?

The overriding aim in building a management team should be to replace weak executives who lack strong skills in closely supervising the people who work under them.

Which one of the following statements concerning developing and strengthening resources and capabilities crucial to goo strategy execution is NOT true?

The surest and cheapest way for a company to develop and strengthen the competencies an capabilities needed to perform strategy critical activities in a competent manner is to acquire or merge with another company that already has higher-caliber expertise in performing these very same strategy-critical activities.

Which of the following best describes the market opportunities that tend to be most relevant to a particular company?

Those market opportunities that can be pursued with the firm's competitively potent resources and capabilities, offer the best growth and profitability, and present the most potential for competitive advantage.

Which of the following statements about the IMPORTANCE of each competitive factor (most particularly influential competitive factors like S/Q Ratings, models/styles and selling prices) in determining company sales volumes and market shares in a particular geographic region is FALSE?

Tiny Cross company differences on a highly influential competitive factor (like S/Q ratings, the number of models/styles offered and selling prices) nearly always have a bigger impact on company sales/market shares in a region than do large differences on less influential competitive factors.

In which one of the following instances is it more advantageous for companies competing in the markets if many foreign countries to disperse their activities across multiple locations?

When transportation costs are high, there are high cross-country trade barriers, and there are benefits to locating buyer related activities close to buyers.

Which of the following is NOT among the common reasons why companies enter into strategic alliance?

To join forces in trying to drive foreign competitors out of their home market.

Which of the following is NOT a typical reason why companies opt to sell their products/services or to locate operations in some or many countries?

To pursue great use of offensive strategies.

Which one of the following statements about first-mover advantages and first-move disadvantages is FALSE?

To sustain any advantage that may initially accrue to a pioneer, a first mover must be a recognized market leader, have a strong brand name, and employ either a best-cost provider or a low-cost provider strategy.

Which of the following is NOT accurate as concerns a company's competencies and capabilities?

When a company succeeds in hiring talented employees and training them properly, competencies and capabilities tend to blossom quickly and, once put in place, can last for a decade or more.

Which one of the following does NOT represent market circumstances that make a focused low-cost or focused differentiation strategy attractive?

When buyers are not strongly brand loyal buyer needs and uses of the industry's product/service are diverse and change occurs at a slow pace.

In which of the following instances is a low-cost provider strategy least likely to be appealing and competitively powerful?

When most buyers use the product in different ways and buyers incur high costs in switching their purchases from one seller to another.

Which of the following statements about Six Sigma programs is false?

When performance of an activity or process reaches "six sigma quality", there are not more than ten defects/errors per million iterations.

Which of the following conditions acts to diminish buyer bargaining power?

When there are big differences among the features, performance, and quality of rival brands such that many buyers come to prefer the brand most suitable to their preferences and pocketbook.

The strength of a "think local, act local" multicountry strategy is that.....

a company's product offering is tailored to accommodate the differing tastes and expectations of buyers in each country and its competitive strategy in each country is customized to combat local rivals and build local competitive advantage.

The distinction between a company mission statement and a strategic vision is that....

a mission statement typically describes a company's present business scope and purpose ("who we are, what we do and why we are here") whereas the principal concern of a strategic vision is with a company's future strategic course ("the direction we are headed and what market position(s) we intend to stake out").

Unhealthy company cultures typically have such characteristics as....

a politicized internal environment, hostility to change, an insular thinking and an inward focus, a low regard for ethical behavior, unethical and greed-driven behaviors and/or incompatible, clashing subcultures.

In managing production worker compensation and expenditures for best practice training, the overriding objective of company managers should be to....

achieve labor costs per pair produced that are at worst below the industry average and at best are very close to (or even equal to) the industry-low in each region where the company has production facilities.

The evolving character of a company's strategy is a consequence of.....

abandoning the strategy elements that are no longer working well, initiating some newly crafted strategy elements to boost financial performance or pursue competitive advantage and the ongoing need to make some strategy adjustments in response to shifting market conditions and other unanticipated developments.

What makes a competitive advantage sustainable or durable as opposed to temporary is.....

actions or elements in the strategy that cause an attractive number of buyers to have lasting reasons to purchase a company's products or services, despite competitors' best efforts to overcome or nullify those reasons.

The attention, energy and resources a company devotes to achieving its strategic objectives.....

are critically important because a stronger market standing with buyers and improved competitive strength to combat rivals-especially when these result in a bigger competitive advantage--is what enables and empowers a company to improve its financial performance in upcoming periods.

According to integrative social contracts theory, the ethical standards a company should try to uphold....

are governed by both (1) a limited number of universal ethical principles that are widely recognized as putting legitimate ethical boundaries on actions and behavior in all situations and (2) the circumstances of local cultures, traditions, and shared values that further prescribe what constitutes ethically permissible behavior and what does not; however, universal ethical norms take precedence over local ethical norms.

State of the art operating systems and real time data.....

are integral to competent strategy execution and operating excellence; they can also be a basis for competitive advantage if they provide a firm with capabilities that rivals can't match.

An Industry's key success factors...

are those competitive factors that most affect industry members' ability to prosper in the marketplace-the particular strategy elements, product attributes, important resources and competitive capabilities, an market achievements that spell the difference between being a strong competitor and a weak competitor.

A company's core values relate to....

certain designated beliefs, traits and ways of doing things that are widely viewed as "good" or "desirable" or maybe even "noble" and that are intended to guide the actions and behavior of company personnel in conducting the company's business and pursuing its strategic vision and mission.

The two biggest drawbacks or negatives of unrelated diversification are....

demanding managerial requirements and the lack of potential for competitive advantage beyond the benefits of good corporate parenting capabilities and what each individual business can generate on its own.

A company's strategic vision

describes the route a company intends to take in developing and strengthening its business, it lays out the company's strategic course in preparing for the future.

The school of ethical relativism holds that....

differing religious beliefs historic traditions and customs, core values and beliefs, and behavioral norms across countries and cultures give rise to multiple sets of standards concerning that is ethically right or wrong; hence, whether certain business-related actions or behaviors are ethically right or wrong depends on the prevailing local ethical standards.

Mergers and acquisitions are often driven by such strategic objectives as to.....

expand a company's geographic coverage, extend its business into new product categories, create more cost-efficient operation out of the combined companies, or strengthen the resulting company's resources, capabilities and competitiveness in important ways.

The nine-cell industry attractiveness/competitive strength matrix provides strong logic for.....

fully funding the resource needs of competitively strong businesses in attractive industries, investing continuously in businesses in the three diagonal cells stretching from the lower left to the upper right of the matrix, and considering whether to divest (sell) businesses that have comparatively low industry attractiveness and low competitive strength (those positioned in the three cells in the lower right corner of the matrix).

A company's stated core values and ethical principals....

have two significant roles in the culture-building process (1) fostering a work climate where company personnel share common and strongly held convictions about how the company's business is to be conducted and (2) providing company personnel with guidance about the manner of which they are to do their jobs--what behaviors and ways of doing things are approved and expecte and which are out of bounds.

The competitive power of a resource or competitive capability hinges on such considerations as.....

how hard the resource/capability is for competitors to copy, whether many or most rivals have a very similar resource or capability, and whether the resource/capability can be trumped by substitute resources and capabilities of rivals.

Evaluating the competitive value of the cross-business strategic fits in a diversified firm's business portfolio entails considerations of...

how much competitive value can be generated from forceful efforts to capture the benefits of strategic fits stemming from cross-business transfer of competitively valuable resources and capabilities, cost-saving efficiencies in the value chains of sister businesses, brand-name sharing and cross-business collaboration to create new performance-enhancing competitive capabilities.

Crafting and executing strategy are top-priority managerial tasks because.....

how well a company performs and the degree of market success it achieves are directly attributable to the caliber of its strategy and the proficiency with which the strategy is executed.

Management's handling of the strategy implementation/execution process can be considered successful...

if a company meets or beats its performance targets and learns to perform strategy-critical value chain activities with real proficiency.

A company's strategy qualifies as "ethical"....

if it does not entail actions or behaviors that cross the moral line from "can do" to "should not do" (because such actions are deceitful, unfair or harmful to others, disreputable or unreasonably damaging to the environment).

In weak culture companies.....

individuals encounter little pressure to do things in particular ways, largely because there is a lack of long standing top management commitment to particular values, principles and behavioral norms.

Re-engineering how a firm performs an activity or business process...

involves redesigning and streamlining the workflow an various work steps in performing a particular business activity (often enabled by cutting-edge use of online technology and information systems), with the goal of achieving quantum gains in performance of the activity.

A company's environmental sustainability strategy concerns....

its deliberate actions to protect the environment , provide for the longevity of natural resources, maintain ecological support systems for future generations, and guard against ultimate endangerment of the planet.

The disadvantages of a centralized organizational structure include...

lengthening response times by those closest to the situation (because it of the time it takes for the review/approval process to run up all the layers of the management bureaucracy, allow time for higher-level managers to gather and process all the relevant information and then reach a decision on a course of action) and discouraging lower-level managers and rank-and-file employees from exercising initiative or taking on any responsibility (because they are expected to wait to be told what to do.)

In organizing the work effort and creating an organization structure that promotes successful strategy execution, management needs to........

make internally-performed strategy-critical activities the main building blocks in the organization structure, decide how much authority to centralize at the top and how much to delegate to down-the-line managers and employees, and make sure the efforts of different organizational units are well coordinated.

The term "triple bottom line" refers to.....

measuring a company's performance in the social responsibility arena and setting formal performance targets in three areas: "profit, people and planet."

Identifying the strategic issues and problems a company faces and compiling a "worry list" that merits front-burner management attention is an important component of assessing a company's resources and ability to compete successfully because......

only after managers have first done serious strategic thinking about how to deal with the items on the worry list are they truly prepared to pick and choose among the alterative strategic actions and initiatives in fashioning an overall strategy that suits the company's situation-the items on the worry list are most definitely a relevant and important part of the company's situation.

In situations where rivals can readily copy the successful features of a company's strategy or duplicate its attempts to attract customers, the only dependable path to competitive advantage is for a company to....

outexecute rivals by developing a collection of resources and capabilities that enables the company to perform certain important value chain activities at lower costs than rivals or with greater effectiveness than rivals(thereby gaining the ability to deliver more value to customers via either lower price or more appealing product).

A company can translate its performance of value chain activities into competitive advantages by doing a first-rate job of.....

performing value chain activities in ways that give a company either a lower-cost advantage or a value creating differentiation advantage of rivals.

Best cost provider strategies are appealing in those market situations where....

product differentiation is the norm and attractively large numbers of buyers shopping for the best value for the money can be induced to purchase midrange products rather than the cheap basic products of low-cost producers or the expensive products of top-of-the-line differentiators.

The chief advantages of a decentralized organizational structure include;

reducing the layers of management and encouraging lower-level managers and rank-and-file employees to exercise initiative and act responsibly

A company's strategy consists of....

the competitive moves and business approaches that managers employ to attract and please customers, compete successfully, pursue opportunities to grow the business, respond to changing market conditions, conduct operations and achieve the targeted financial and market performance.

For there to be reasonable expectations that a company's move to diversify into a new business will result in added economic value for shareholders, a move to diversify into a new business must pass..

the industry attractiveness test, the cost o entry test, and the better-off test.

If one concurs with the school of ethical universalism, then one believes that.....

the most fundamental concepts of what is right and what is wrong are universal and transcend most all cultures, societies, and religions; thus, it is entirely appropriate to expect all members of society (including all personnel of all companies worldwide) to conform to universal ethical standards.

Multicountry competition is best characterized as a market situation where...

there is no global or world market, just a collection of mostly self-contained country markets that are not competitively connected.

Multicountry competition exists when.....

there's so much cross-country variation in market conditions and in the companies contending for leadership that the market contest among rivals in one country is localized o that country and not closely connected to the market contests in other countries; hence, there is no global or world market, just a collection of self-contained country markets.

Which of the following is NOT one of the objectives of benchmarking?

to assist a company in creating a state-of-the-art value chain that makes cost-efficient use of high caliber resources and sophisticated technology in performing all of its primary activities and support activities.