Latest Corporate Strategy Objective Questions
1. The value chain attempts to identify those activities, which add value?
A) The organization’s stakeholders
B) The senior strategic managers in the organization
C) The organization’s shareholders
D) The customer or final user
Ans: D
2. What are core competences?
A) Resources that critically underpin competitive advantage and others cannot obtain.
B) Activities and processes needed to meet customers’ minimum requirements and therefore to continue to exist.
C) Key skills required for success in a particular business.
D) Activities that underpin competitive advantage and are difficult for competitors to imitate or obtain
Ans: D
3. Strategic stretch involves?
A) The fit between the organization and its environment
B) Creating new opportunities by stretching and exploiting capabilities in new ways
C) The skills of the senior management
D) Utilizing all the resources of an organization to their full capacity
Ans: D
4. The value chain is composed of primary & support activities. Which answer below provides the correct components for primary activities?
A) Service, human resource management, marketing & sales, operations and outbound logistics
B) Marketing & Sales, Operations, Outbound Logistics and Service
C) Procurement, Firm Infrastructure, Human Resource Management, Technology Development, and Marketing & Sales
D) Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing & Sales, and Service.
Ans: D
5. What is the purpose of an activity map?
A) A system to facilitate better time planning
B) It is used in business process reengineering to show how the different activities of an organization are linked together.
C) It is used to identify and understand strategic capability by mapping how the different activities of an organization are linked together.
D) A list of activities undertaken by an organization
Ans: C
6. Competitive advantage through linkages between the organization and its value network can be achieved by?
A) Vertical integration
B) Adopting common quality standards internally and externally (with suppliers)
C) Examining supplier specifications, common merchandising, applying quality management principles, or by collaborating with other organizations in the form of strategic alliances or joint ventures.
D) Outsourcing customer service to India
Ans: C
7. Which of the following drivers determines cost efficiency?
A) Supply Costs, Experience, Product/Process Design, and Economies of Scale.
B) Supply Costs & Economies of Scale.
C) Product/Process Design and Economies of Scale
D) Experience
Ans: A
8. Robustness of strategic capabilities is more likely when?
A) Linkages in the value network are exploited.
B) Core competences are complex, ambiguous, and dependent on culture/history.
C) Competences lie with specific individuals.
D) Core competences lie in separate parts of the organization’s value chain.
Ans: A,B
9. Which types of organizational knowledge are sources of competitive advantage?
A) Explicit knowledge, which is classified and formalized in a planned and systematic way
B) Personal knowledge, which is hard to communicate and formalize
C) Customer databases, market research reports, management reports.
D) Collective and shared experience accumulated through systems, routines, and activities of sharing across the organization.
Ans: D
10. In the resource-based view of strategy, what type of strategic capabilities are the sources of sustainable competitive advantage?
A) Unique resources and core competences
B) Dynamic capabilities
C) Operational excellence
D) Strategic capabilities, which are valuable to buyers, rare, robust, and non-substitutable
Ans: D
11. What are the three criteria for the robustness of strategic capability?
A) Core competences, unique resources, and dynamic capabilities
B) Complexity, causal ambiguity and value to customers
C) Complexity, causal ambiguity and rarity.
D) Complexity, causal ambiguity and culture/history
Ans: D
12. Industry/sector benchmarking compares?
A) Organizational performance between firms/public sector organizations in the same industry or sector
B) Organizational performance between firms/public sector organizations in different countries
C) Organizational performance between different divisions of the firm
Ans: A