Reference no: EM131430188

Crafting and executive strategy-

Evaluating a Company's Resources and Competitiveness

1
Which of the following questions is not an integral part of analyzing a company's resources and competitive position?
A)
What does the company's value chain look like?
B)
Is the company competitively stronger or weaker than key rivals?
C)
What are the company's resource strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats?
D)
Are the company's prices and costs competitive?
E)
What strategic issues and problems merit front-burner managerial attention?

2
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 efforts to build competitive advantage

3
Which one of the following is not a good indicator of how well a company's present strategy is working?
A)
The company's market share ranking and whether its share is trending up, down, or staying more or less the same
B)
Whether the company is regarded as a leader in some significant area (technology, product quality, customer service, product innovation and so on) and the firm's image and reputation with customers
C)
Whether the company's profit margins are increasing or decreasing and how large they are relative to other firms in the industry
D)
Whether the company's resource strengths and competitive capabilities outnumber its resource weaknesses and competitive vulnerabilities
E)
Whether the company is achieving its stated financial and strategic objectives and whether the company is an above-average or below-average industry performer

4
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 action to improve the company's strategy.
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 actions for improving the company's strategy.
E)
All of these.

5
A core competence
A)
holds the potential for being a cornerstone of a company's strategy because it gives a company competitive capability and qualifies as a genuine company strength and resource.
B)
nearly always resides in the caliber of the company's assets on its balance sheet rather than in its people and in its intellectual capital; furthermore, balance sheet-related core competencies tend to be competitively more valuable than core competencies grounded in intellectual capital.
C)
is better suited to helping a company defend against external threats than in pursuing external market opportunities.
D)
is usually tied closely to the caliber of a company's manufacturing capability and/or its proprietary technology and know-how.
E)
is a more valuable company resource than either a "competence" or a "distinctive competence" but it is not as good a resource strength as a "competitive capability."

6
Which of the following groups of characteristics is least likely to represent company strengths or competitive assets?
A)
Physical assets such as state-of-the-art plants, attractive real estate locations, and worldwide distribution facilities
B)
More plants than rivals, more employees than rivals, being in business more years than rivals, and smaller capital investment expenditures than rivals
C)
A well-known brand name, a highly motivated workforce, and the collective learning embedded in the organization
D)
Short development times in bringing new products to market, a strong dealer network, strong collaborative partnerships with key suppliers, and an experienced and capable workforce
E)
Proven quality control skills, good supply chain management capabilities, state-of-the-art systems for doing business via the Internet, and a strong balance sheet

7
A distinctive competence
A)
is a more important competitive asset than a core competence.
B)
represents competitive superiority in performing an activity and thus is a basis for building a competitive advantage over rivals.
C)
is a competitively important value chain activity that a company performs better than its rivals.
D)
is a strong candidate for being used as a cornerstone of a company's strategy.
E)
All of the above.

8
Which of the following is not a measure of the competitive power of a company's resource strengths and competitive capabilities?
A)
How hard it is for competitors to copy a particular resource strength or competitive capability of a company
B)
Whether the company has more resources/capabilities than any other key rival
C)
Whether the resource or capability is really competitively superior to what rivals have or can do
D)
How easily the resource or capability can be trumped by the different resources/capabilities of rivals
E)
Whether the resource or capability is durable and has staying power (in the sense of not losing its value quickly because of new developments)

9
The industry or market opportunities that are most relevant to a company and those which its strategy should aim at capturing include
A)
opportunities that are well-suited to the company's competitive capabilities and resource strengths.
B)
opportunities which the company has the financial resources to pursue.
C)
opportunities that offer important avenues for growth.
D)
opportunities where the company has the greatest potential for competitive advantage.
E)
All of the above.

10
Which of the following is not an example of an external threat to a company's well-being?
A)
Mounting intensity of competition among industry rivals and costly new regulatory requirements
B)
Having a weaker brand image than rivals and a smaller network of retailer dealers than rivals
C)
Shifts in buyer needs and preferences away from using the industry's product to using alternative products instead
D)
Vulnerability to industry driving forces and averse demographic changes that are likely to curtail demand for the industry's product
E)
Growing bargaining power on the part of customers and suppliers

11
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.

12
A company's value chain
A)
consists of the activities a company performs in converting its resource weaknesses into resource strengths.
B)
consists of 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)
consists of the activities a company performs to build a competence and turn it into a strong competitive capability.
D)
identifies the primary activities and related support activities that a company performs in developing a distinctive competence.
E)
identifies each and every activity that results in a cost to the company and that, therefore, has to be covered by its price.

13
Benchmarking
A)
is inherently unethical if it involves companies that are direct competitors because it involves gathering competitively sensitive cost information.
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 tool that allows a company to determine whether the manner in which it performs particular functions and activities represents industry "best practices" when both cost and effectiveness are taken into account-it is especially helpful in determining whether a company's costs for certain value chain activities are in or out of line with competitors.
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 proven not to be reliable or trustworthy.
E)
entails calculating the costs of performing each of the primary and related support activities in a company's value chain.

14
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 competences 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.

15
Strategic actions to eliminate a cost disadvantage
A)
can aim at lowering costs in the suppliers' part of the industry value chain, in a company's own internally-performed activities, and/or in the forward channel portion of the value chain.
B)
work best when they aim at lowering the costs of performing those tasks and activities where the company has core competencies and distinctive competencies.
C)
work best when they involve increasing the company's low-cost competitive assets and decreasing its high-cost competitive assets.
D)
entail switching from traditional accounting to activity-based costing approaches.
E)
typically include efforts to concentrate more company resources and talents on those skills and activities where the company has the lowest costs.

16
The options for attacking the high costs of items purchased from suppliers include
A)
trying to negotiate more favorable prices with suppliers.
B)
backward vertical integration.
C)
switching to lower priced substitute inputs.
D)
working with suppliers on the design and specifications for what is being supplied so as to identify cost savings that will allow them to lower their costs and prices.
E)
All of these.

17
One of the most dependable ways for a company to build competitive advantage
A)
is developing the skills, competencies, and capabilities to perform competitively crucial value chain activities better than competitors.
B)
is using its resource strengths to insulate itself from the impact of the five competitive forces.
C)
is improving the caliber of its product or service (because superior products or services are almost impossible to clone or improve upon).
D)
is moving into the strategic group where profit margins are highest.
E)
is neutralizing the external threats to a company's well-being and then focusing company resources on the company's single best market opportunity.

18
Doing a competitive strength assessment involves
A)
developing a list of 6 to 10 telling measures of competitive strength measures.
B)
rating each company on each KSF and strength measure (using a scale of 1 to 10) and employing an unweighted or, preferably, a weighted rating system.
C)
summing the individual strength ratings to get an overall measure of competitive strength for each competitor.
D)
drawing conclusions about the size of the company's net competitive advantage or disadvantage.
E)
All of the above.

19
Identifying the strategic issues that company managers need to address
A)
involves using the results of both industry and competitive analysis and what has been learned from evaluating the company's present strategy, SWOT analysis, and the evaluations of the company's own competitiveness
B)
entails developing a "worry list" of "how to...", "whether to....", and "what to do about....."
C)
is an important component of company situation analysis because a good strategy must include actions to deal with all the strategic issues that need to be addressed.
D)
entails locking in on what challenges the company has to overcome in order to be financially and competitively successful in the years ahead.
E)
All of the above.

20
Which of the following statements is false?
A)
The higher a company's costs are above those of close rivals, the more competitively vulnerable it becomes.
B)
Because the value chains of rival companies tend to be quite similar, a company can accurately assess its cost competitiveness in end-use markets by benchmarking its internally-performed activities against the internally performed activities of rivals-costs outside a company's own value chain do not affect whether it is at a cost advantage or disadvantage.
C)
A company's cost competitiveness depends not only on the costs of internally performed value chain activities but also on the costs of activities performed by its suppliers and forward channel allies.
D)
The stronger a company's financial performance and market position, the more likely it has a well-conceived, well-executed strategy.
E)
A competence is something a company is good at doing whereas a core competence is a proficiently performed internal activity that is central to a company's strategy and competitiveness.