Global Strat Multiple Choice

In the pyramid of corporate social responsibility, ________ responsibilities are the foundational building block.

economic

The best example of a firm's external stakeholder is a(n)

government agency that regulates the prices of products manufactured by the firm.

Firms that are classified as operating in an oligopoly tend to have some pricing power if they are able to differentiate their product or service offerings from those of their competitors, so the recommended mode of competition is

non-price-based competition

Which of the following is an element of good strategy?

a set of coherent actions to implement the firm's guiding policy

Which of the following is the best characterization of sociocultural forces?

a society's culture, norms, and values

According to the resource-based view, a firm's competitive advantage often stems from its

intangible resources

_____ are barriers to imitation that prevent rivals from competing away the advantage a firm may enjoy.

isolating mechanisms

Core competencies are derived from the combination of

key strategic resources and a firm's capabilities.

Which of the following features about a buyer indicates that the buyer has high bargaining power?

when the buyer purchases inputs that are standardized or undifferentiated commodities

The goal of a good strategy is focused primarily on

creating superior value while containing costs

Companies in the same strategic group are ________ to each other.

direct competitors

Which of the following statements is true of corporate strategy?

A corporate strategy must be able to create synergies across business units that are quite different.

Which of the following statements is true of the social responsibilities of a business?

A firm's ethical responsibilities go beyond its legal responsibilities.

Which of the following summarizes the difference between a firm's vision and mission?

A vision states what a firm wants to accomplish; a mission states how a firm plans to accomplish this vision.

The ________ is a model that links strategy analysis, strategy formulation, and strategy implementation, which together helps managers plan and implement a strategy that can improve performance and result in competitive advantage.

AFI strategy framework

A firm's strategic position is likely to be strong when

the gap between the value the firm's product generates and the cost to produce it is large.

Which of the following factors most contributes to the U.S. automotive industry being characterized by high entry barriers?

Car manufacturers require large-scale production in order to be cost-competitive.

While implementing strategic group mapping for the U.S. domestic airline industry, two strategic groups become apparent: low-cost, point-to-point airlines (Virgin Atlantic, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines) versus differentiated airlines using a hub-and-spoke system (American, Delta, and United). Which of the following statements is true about these two strategic groups?

Competitive rivalry between Virgin Atlantic and JetBlue is likely to be higher than that between American and Southwest Airlines.

Which of the following summarizes the difference between corporate strategy and business strategy?

Corporate strategy deals with where to compete; business strategy deals with how to compete.

Which of the following statements is true of customer-oriented visions?

Customer-oriented visions identify how a customer need will be met.

Organizational values help people make choices that are ethical and company-goal-oriented. These values answer which strategic management question?

How do we accomplish our goals in the organization?

Do vision statements help firms gain and sustain competitive advantage?

It depends, because the effectiveness of vision statements differ by type.

How is a firm's task environment different from its general environment?

Managers have some influence over external factors in the task environment; they have little direct effect over external forces in the general environment.

In nearly every case, which of the Five Forces is the most important in determining the relative power structure in an industry?

No single force is dominant in most every case.

The ________ allows the scanning, monitoring, and evaluating of changes and trends in a firm's macro environment.

PESTEL framework

Which of the following statements is true about strategic groups?

Profitability varies between different strategic groups.

Which of the following statements accurately describes a firm's resource stock?

Resource stocks are a firm's current level of intangible resources.

________ is best described as an integrative management field that combines analysis, formulation, and implementation in the quest for competitive advantage.

Strategic management

________ is best described as a set of goal-directed actions a firm takes to gain and sustain superior performance relative to competitors.

Strategy

In which of the following situations is the power of suppliers high in an industry?

Suppliers' industry is more concentrated than the industry it sells to.

Which of the following statements about product-oriented visions is true?

They tend to force managers to take a myopic view of the competitive landscape.

In an industry, the threat of entry is high when

capital requirements are low

Assume a firm's resources and capabilities are costly to imitate. This is because rival companies do not clearly understand the relationship between the resources and capabilities controlled by the firm. In this case, the firm's competitive advantage is protected against imitation by

casual ambiguity

To help a firm achieve a competitive advantage, each distinct activity performed in the value chain needs to

contribute to the firm's strategic position as either low-cost leader or differentiator.

Most consumers and investors today want the firms they do business with to look beyond just the profit motive. In fact, they want firms that behave legally and ethically while also giving back to their communities via philanthropic activities. The framework that attempts to reconcile these wants is known as

corporate social responsibility

In the final step of the stakeholder impact analysis, a firm

decides a course of action to address the stakeholders' concerns.

The first step to gain and sustain a competitive advantage is to

define a firm's vision, mission, and values.

In a firm's external environment, ________ trends primarily capture population characteristics related to age, gender, family size, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and socioeconomic class.

demographic

Which of the following functions do the general managers in strategic business units primarily perform?

design generic business strategies based on guidelines received from corporate headquarters

To support the rise of emergent strategies, an organization should

empower lower-level employees to take up autonomous actions.

In the AFI strategy framework, strategy analysis primarily involves

evaluating the effects of internal resources and core competencies on a firm's potential to gain and sustain a competitive advantage.

A successful strategy details a set of goal-directed actions that managers make to gain and sustain a competitive advantage; in order to create this strategy, managers must focus on three pillars. Which of the following below isnot one of these pillars?

execution

In the context of the resource-based model of competitive advantage, if a successful firm exhibits resource immobility it means that the

firm will have a sustained competitive advantage because of its unique resources that are difficult for others to replicate.

A strategic group will typically include

firms within the same industry.

A firm will fail to create a sustained competitive advantage when the

fit between its internal strengths and the external environment is static.

A "perfectly competitive" industry is one that

has commodity product offerings, usually exhibits low profitability, and have difficulty achieving even a temporary competitive advantage (All of the answers are correct)

As a part of strategy formulation, a firm's functional strategy primarily concerns questions relating to

how to implement business strategy.

After a firm has identified its key stakeholders in stakeholder impact analysis, the immediate next step is to

identify stakeholders' interests and claims.

The first step in stakeholder impact analysis involves

identifying the stakeholders that currently have, or potentially can have, a material effect on a company.

Which of the following is a macroeconomic factor that can affect a firm's strategy?

levels of employment

Firms that compete within the same strategic group generally experience

more competitive rivalry than firms outside their strategic group.

According to Porter's Five Forces approach, the overall goal of applying the Five Forces analysis to an industry is to make a judgment about its

overall attractiveness

_____ describes a process in which the options one faces in a current situation are limited by decisions made in the past.

path dependence

Which of the following three important stakeholder attributes should managers pay special close attention to in order to better understand stakeholder impact analysis?

power, legitimacy, and urgency

A ________ is best described as any activity a firm pursues to explore and develop new products and processes, new markets, or new ventures.

strategic initiative

A traditional top-down strategic planning process typically begins with

strategic leaders adjusting a company's vision and mission based on environmental analysis.

A firm's ________ relates to its ability to create value for customers (V) while containing the cost to do so (C).

strategic position

Which of the following is not captured when examining a competitive industry structure?

the ability to engage in forward vertical integration

Which of the following external forces is a part of a firm's task environment?

the composition of the strategic group to which the firm belongs

If you examine various barriers to entry facing firms that might wish to enter the airline industry, this would be most helpful in assessing which of the five forces in that industry?

threat of new entrants

Which of the following is a customer-oriented vision?

to enable businesses to improve their employee communications

The primary objective of Porter's five forces model is to

understand the profit potential of industries.

Why is it better for firms to keep their vision statements customer-oriented rather than product-oriented?

Customer-oriented visions tend to be more flexible when adapting to changing environments.

Which of the following is a primary feature of the five forces model?

It views competition within an industry broadly to include forces such as buyers, suppliers, and the threat of substitutes.

Which of the following statements accurately brings out the difference between monopolistic competition and an oligopoly?

Sellers in an oligopoly provide highly differentiated products; in monopolistic competition, the products sold are undifferentiated or standardized.

A company uses the planned emergence approach in the development of its strategies. Which of the following is an implication of this?

The company's organizational structure and systems will be designed to support bottom-up strategic initiatives.

Which of the following tasks in the AFI strategy framework involves evaluating the internal and external environments in which a firm operates?

analysis

Which of the following is NOT considered an important macro-environmental influence on businesses (that is, a potential influence beyond that of the industry alone)?

bargaining power of suppliers

A firmalways has a competitive disadvantage when its return on invested capital is

below the industry average.

In the five forces model developed by Michael Porter, ________ is not defined narrowly as a firm's closest competitors but rather more broadly to include other factors in an industry like buyers, suppliers, potential new entry of other firms, and the threat of substitutes.

competition

Which of the following terms describes the guiding policy to address the competitive challenge, and uses corporate- and business-level strategy?

competitive advantage

All of the following are external stakeholders except which of the following?

competitors

A(n) ________ is best described as the strategic option that top managers decide most closely matches the current reality and which is then executed.

dominant strategic plan

Tesla is addressing environmental concerns regarding the carbon emissions of gasoline-powered cars by building zero-emission battery-powered vehicles. This best represents which of the following PESTEL categories?

ecological

Which of the following is typically an economic responsibility of a firm?

paying adequate returns to the firm's stockholders on the capital invested by them

Value chain analysis consists of systematically analyzing a firm's key activities that for analysis purposes are categorized into two groups:

primary and support activities

A firm is said to gain a competitive advantage when it can

provide products similar to its competitors, but at lower prices.

Which of the following strategy plans might work best in an industry that is considered a fast-changing environment with new laws going into effect regularly?

scenario planning

A customer-oriented vision statement focuses employees to think about how best to

solve a problem for a consumer.

In order to better achieve a competitive advantage, firms must now adopt a holistic approach towards satisfying multiple stakeholders opposed to focusing on the needs of their stockholders. This integrative approach is referred to as

stakeholder strategy

The process that describes the method by which managers conceive of and implement a strategy that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage is called

strategic management

According to AFI strategy framework, in which of the following tasks of strategic management is a firm's vision, mission, and values identified?

strategy analysis

Which of the following stages of the strategic management process involves an evaluation of a firm's external and internal environments?

strategy analysis

In ________, a firm frames a guiding policy to address the competitive challenge.

strategy formulation

Which of the following stages in the AFI strategy framework involves designing a business, corporate, and global strategy?

strategy formulation

Through ________, a firm puts its guiding policy into practice by employing a set of coherent actions.

strategy implementation

Which of the following tasks in the AFI strategy framework involves putting the formulated strategy into practice through organizational structure, culture, and controls?

strategy implementation