Q1. Which of the following is not one of the principal
managerial components associated with implementing and executing strategy?
A) Adopting an organizational structure that supports
strategies intended to create customer value.
B) Ensuring that policies and procedures facilitate rather
than impede strategy execution.
C) Staffing the organization with people having the right skills
and expertise.
D) Reducing the layers of management to a bare minimum and
making sure employees are empowered.
E) Instilling a corporate culture that promotes good
strategy execution.
Q2. The overriding aim in building a management team should
be to _______________
A) assemble a critical mass of talented managers who can
function as agents of change and further the cause of first-rate strategy
execution.
B) select people who are charismatic and good communicators.
C) choose managers who have substantial experience in the
industry.
D) assemble a team of people who believe in the same
leadership approaches and use the same approaches to people management.
E) choose managers who have the same core values and ethical
standards.
Q3. Recruiting and retaining capable employees
_______________
A) is usually much
more important to good strategy execution than is assembling a capable top
management team.
B) is easily the most critical aspect in building
competitively valuable core competencies and capabilities.
C) is more easily done by large multinational corporations
because of their deep financial resources and stimulating job assignments.
D) is largely a function of the skills and capabilities of
the company’s human resources staff.
E) is important because the quality of an organization’s
people is always an essential ingredient of successful strategy
execution—knowledgeable, engaged employees are a company’s best source of
creative ideas for the nuts-and-bolts operating improvements that lead to
operating excellence.
Q4. Which of the following is generally not among the
practices that companies use to staff jobs with the best people they can find,
particularly if intellectual capital greatly aids good strategy execution?
A) Providing promising employees with challenging,
interesting, and skill-stretching assignments.
B) Striving to retain talented, high-performing employees
via promotions, salary increases, performance bonuses, stock options and equity
ownership, fringe benefit packages, and other perks.
C) Fostering a stimulating and engaging work environment
such that employees will consider the company a great place to work.
D) Coaching average performers to improve their skills and
capabilities, while weeding out underperformers.
E) Hiring only people below the age of 35 who have college
degrees and a grade point average of B or better.
Q5. The rationale for making strategy-critical value chain
activities the primary building blocks in a company’s organizational scheme is
based on _______________
A) the contribution it makes to improving labor productivity
and reducing labor costs.
B) the benefits of keeping the layers of management to a
minimum.
C) the thesis that if activities crucial to strategic
success are to have the resources, decision-making influence, and
organizational impact they need, they have to be centerpieces in the
organizational scheme.
D) the benefit of keeping the organization structure simple
and easy for employees to understand.
E) making it easier to capture the benefits of centralized
decision making.
Q6. Which one of the following falsely describes a
centralized approach to decision making?
A) Little discretionary authority is granted to frontline
supervisors and rank-and-file employees.
B) Hierarchical command-and-control structures speed an
organization’s responses to changing conditions because top-level managers are
in a position to quickly review the situation and make a final decision.
C) Tight control by a few senior managers makes it easy to
fix accountability when things do not go well.
D) There is an assumption that frontline personnel have
neither the time nor the inclination to direct and properly control the work
they are performing, and that they lack the knowledge and judgment to make wise
decisions about how best to do their work.
E) Top executives retain authority for most strategic and
operating decisions.
Q7. A change in strategy nearly always entails budget
reallocations because _______________
A) new strategic initiatives can be costly or capital
intensive.
B) units important in the prior strategy but having a lesser
role in the new strategy may need downsizing while units and activities that
now have a bigger and more critical strategic role may need more people, new
equipment, additional facilities, and above-average increases in their
operating budgets.
C) the accompanying policy revisions and compensation
incentives tend to require different levels of funding than before.
D) of corresponding changes in the company’s organizational
structure and budgetary requirements.
E) adopting best
practices and pushing for continuous improvement tend to reduce costs and
reduce overall resource requirements.
Q8. Prescribing policies and operating procedures aid the
task of implementing strategy by _______________
A) helping empower product champions and work teams.
B) paving the way for instituting TQM or Six Sigma programs
and adopting best practices.
C) providing top-down guidance regarding how things need to
be none, enforcing consistency in how activities are performed, and promoting
the creation of a work climate that facilitates good strategy execution.
D) helping prevent the corporate culture from being
unhealthy and weak.
E) pushing employees to accept the need for state-of-the-art
operating and support systems.
Q9. Business process
reengineering is a tool for _______________
A) remodeling and refreshing a strategy-critical core
competence.
B) pulling the pieces of strategy-critical activities out of
different departments and unifying their performance in a single department or
cross-functional work.
C) reducing the size of a company’s managerial bureaucracy.
D) boosting the quality of a company’s product and the
caliber of its customer service.
E) expediting the development of an important new
competitive capability.
Q10. Total quality management (TQM) _______________
A) is a philosophy of managing that involves convincing
employees that superior product quality is the most reliable key to competitive
success in the marketplace.
B) is a tool for providing customers with the highest quality
product of any company in the industry.
C) involves managing company operations in a manner
calculated to quickly and efficiently make quantum gains in the quality and
effectiveness with which production activities are performed.
D) is a philosophy of managing a set of business practices
that emphasizes continuous improvement in all phases of operations, 100 percent
accuracy in performing tasks, involvement and empowerment of employees at all
levels, team-based work design, benchmarking, and total customer satisfaction.
E) involves managing company operations in a manner
calculated to result in mistake-free management of a company’s entire business.
Q11. Six Sigma quality control _______________
A) is a tool that is superior to TQM in achieving top-notch
quality in manufacturing a product.
B) consists of a disciplined, statistics-based system aimed
at producing not more than 2.5 defects per million iterations.
C) is based on three principles: (1) all work is a process;
(2) all processes have variability; and (3) all processes create data that
explain variability.
D) is the best practice for managing manufacturing and
assembly activities.
E) is a disciplined, statistics-based approach to manufacturing
or assembling a product and results in 5 defects per million iterations when
implemented properly.
Q12. Company strategies and value creating processes can’t
be effectively executed without internal operating systems that include:
A) PCs, servers, web applications, and e-business solutions.
B) TQM, reengineering, and Six Sigma programs.
C) customer data, employee data, supplier/partner data,
operations data, and financial performance data.
D) benchmarking and best practices.
E) All of these.
Q13. Management’s most powerful tool for mobilizing employee
commitment to competent strategy execution and operating excellence is
_______________
A) total quality management.
B) business process reengineering.
C) a properly designed reward structure.
D) making the company a great place to work in terms of pay
scales, fringe benefits, and employee perks.
E) effective screening of job applicants such that only the
most motivated and energetic people are hired.
Q14. Which of the following is not characteristic of a
compensation and reward system designed to help drive successful strategy
execution?
A) Making the performance payoff a major, not minor, piece
of the total compensation package.
B) Keeping performance incentives and bonuses to less than
15 percent of total compensation.
C) Not skirting the system to find ways to reward effort
rather than results.
D) Having incentives that extend to all managers and all
workers and generously rewarding people who turn in outstanding performances.
E) Making sure the time between achieving the target
performance outcome and the payment of the reward is as short as possible.
Q15. Which of the following is not an important nonmonetary
approach to enhancing motivation and helping drive successful strategy
execution?
A) Adopting promotion from within policies and acting on
suggestions from employees.
B) Providing attractive perks and fringe benefits.
C) Creating a work atmosphere in which there is genuine
sincerity, caring, and mutual respect among employees and management.
D) Providing rank-and-file employees with representation on
the company’s board of directors.
E) Using frequent words of praise to recognize employees for
commendable performance.
Q16. Which one of the following is not something that shapes
and helps define a company’s culture?
A) The core values,
beliefs, business principles, and traditions that permeate the workplace.
B) The work practices and behaviors that define “how we
do things around here”: The company’s standards of what is ethically
acceptable and what is not, along with the legends and stories that people
repeat to illustrate and reinforce the company’s core values, traditions, and
business practices.
C) A company’s
approach to people management and its style of operating.
D) The strategy and business model that the company has
adopted.
E) The “chemistry” that permeates its work
environment.
Q17. Which of the following is not one of the five types of
unhealthy company cultures?
A) Bureaucratic cultures.
B) Change-resistant cultures.
C) Unethical and greed-driven cultures.
D) Politicized cultures.
E) Insular, inwardly focused cultures.
Q18. The hallmarks of a high-performance corporate culture
include _______________
A) a shared willingness to adapt core values and ethical
standards to fit the changing requirements of an evolving strategy, use of a
balanced scorecard approach to tracking company performance, and a gung-ho
approach to discovering best practices.
B) considerable political infighting that typically consumes
a great deal of organizational energy, often with the result that what’s best
for the company takes a backseat to political maneuvering.
C) a “can-do” spirit, pride in doing things right,
no-excuses accountability, and a pervasive results-oriented work climate where
people go the extra mile to meet or beat stretch objectives.
D) charismatic managerial leadership, a lean management
bureaucracy, and a must-be-invented-here mind set.
E) strong inclinations to adopt a wait-and-see posture,
carefully analyze several alternative responses, learn from the missteps of
early movers, and then move forward cautiously and conservatively with initiatives
that are deemed safe.
Q19. When trying to change a problem culture, management
should undertake such steps as _______________
A) selecting a team of rank-and-file employees to lead the
culture change effort.
B) hosting company outings to help build camaraderie among
employees and support for the culture change.
C) drawing up an action plan to change the present culture
and then persuading company personnel why this plan of action is good and will
be successful.
D) conducting an employee survey to determine the
organization’s cultural norms and what company personnel like and dislike about
the current culture.
E) identifying which aspects of the present culture are
supportive of good strategy execution and which ones are not.
Q20. Which one of the following is not a means of building
and strengthening competitively valuable resources and capabilities?
A) engaging in experience-building activities such as
collaborative efforts in R&D engineering and design.
B) acquiring capabilities through mergers and acquisitions.
C) shifting from decentralized to centralized decision
making so as to give senior executives more authority and control in driving
cultural change.
D) entering into collaborative partnerships with suppliers,
competitors or other companies that possess needed expertise.
E) none of the above.
