Exam 10: Building an Organization Capable of Good Strategy Execution: People, Capabilities, and Structure

A) making it hard to effectively empower employees.
B) making it difficult to have closely related activities report to a single executive.
C) that pieces of strategically relevant activities and capabilities often end up scattered across many departments each pursuing its own priorities, projects and agendas.
D) impeding the use of outsourcing.
E) making it hard to fix managerial accountability for poor results.

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A) Reducing the size of the corporate bureaucracy and the layers of management
B) Making it easy to fix accountability when company performance targets are not met and enhanced capture of cross-business strategic fits
C) Promoting greater motivation and involvement in the business on the part of more company personnel
D) Spurring new ideas and creative thinking
E) Encouraging lower level managers and rank-and-file employees to exercise initiative and act responsibly

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A) Careful screening and evaluation of job applicants, along with continuous training and retraining of employees
B) Rotating people through jobs that not only have great content but also span functional and geographic boundaries
C) Weeding out the 20% lowest performing employees each year
D) Encouraging employees to challenge existing ways of doing things, to be creative and innovative in proposing better ways of operating, and to push their ideas for new products or businesses
E) Fostering a stimulating and engaging work environment such that employees will consider the company a great place to work

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A) The key to leveraging core competencies into competitive advantage is concentrating sufficient effort and talent on deepening and strengthening them that the firm achieves dominating depth and gains the capability to outperform rivals by a meaningful margin.
B) Core competencies have to be tweaked and adjusted to keep them fresh and responsive to changing customer needs and market conditions.
C) Core competencies typically are lodged in the combined efforts of different work groups and departments.
D) Core competencies generally grow out of company efforts to master a strategy-critical technology or to invent and patent a valuable technology.
E) Core competencies tend to emerge gradually rather than blossoming quickly.

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A) resource strengths and competitive capabilities that allow it to incorporate attributes at lower costs than rivals whose products have similar attributes.
B) the formal and informal arrangement of tasks, responsibilities, lines of authority, and reporting relationships by which the firm is administered.
C) excellent marketing and sales skills to convince buyers to pay a premium price for the attributes/features incorporated in its product.
D) sustainable distinctive competences to ensure cost reduction and competitiveness.
E) None of these.

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A) the task of revising and enhancing the company's core competencies.
B) choosing which leadership style to employ in trying to carry out the strategy successfully.
C) evaluating whether existing policies and procedures are adequately strategy-supportive.
D) allocating more resources to strategy-critical parts of the business.
E) a probing assessment of what the organization must do differently and better to carry out the strategy successfully.

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A) Outsourcing support services often has cost-saving benefits but outsourcing primary value chain activities has the disadvantages of raising fixed costs, reducing variable costs, and making it harder to develop distinctive competencies.
B) Outsourcing critics contend that shifting responsibility for performing value-chain activities to outside specialists can hollow out a company's knowledge base and capabilities, leaving it at the mercy of outsider suppliers, and short of the resource strengths to be a master of its own destiny.
C) Outsourcing the performance of certain value chain activities to able suppliers can add to a company's arsenal of capabilities and contribute to better strategy execution.
D) The real debate surrounding outsourcing is not about whether too much outsourcing risks loss of control but about how to use outsourcing in a manner that produces greater competitiveness.
E) Outsourcing can enable a company to heighten its strategic focus and concentrate its full energies and resources on even more competently performing those value chain activities that are at the core of its strategy and for which it can create unique value.

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A) Executing strategy is an action-oriented, make-things-happen task.
B) Executing strategy tests a manager's ability to direct organizational change, achieve continuous improvement in operations and business processes, create and nurture a strategy-supportive culture, and consistently meet or beat performance targets.
C) The challenge of successfully implementing new strategic initiatives principally involves employing managerial techniques to overcome resistance to change.
D) Strategy execution requires a team effort that entails every manager thinking through the answer to "What does my area have to do to implement its part of the strategic plan, and what should I do to get these things accomplished effectively and efficiently?"
E) Implementing and executing strategy is primarily an operations-driven activity revolving around the management of people and business processes.

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A) requires first developing the ability to do something, however imperfectly or inefficiently; second, translating this ability into a competence by learning to do the activity consistently well and at an acceptable cost; and then continuing to polish and refine its know-how in an effort to further improve its performance, ideally striving to match or beat rivals in performing the activity.
B) entails establishing a new department with primary responsibility for developing the expertise to give the company the needed core competencies and capabilities.
C) stands a better chance of succeeding if a company employs a traditional functional organization structure.
D) is made much easier if a company abstains from outsourcing important value chain activities.
E) aims at turning the company's distinctive competencies into core competencies.

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A) is primarily an operations-driven activity revolving around the management of people and business processes.
B) tests a manager's ability to direct organizational change and achieve continuous improvement in operations and business processes.
C) tests a manager's ability to create and nurture a strategy-supportive culture.
D) tests a manager's ability to consistently meet or beat performance ?targets.
E) All of these.

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A) creates a more horizontal or flatter organization structure with fewer management layers and usually acts to shorten organizational response times.
B) usually slows down decision-making because so many more people are involved and it takes longer to reach a consensus on what to do and when to do it.
C) can be a de-motivating factor because it requires people to take responsibility for their decisions and actions.
D) is very, very risky because it usually results in lots of "bad" decisions on the part of employees and lower levels of financial performance.
E) enhances greater cross-unit coordination and aids the capture of strategic fit benefits across related businesses.

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A) increasing the size of the corporate bureaucracy.
B) slowing a company's response times to changing external events because approval of what course of action to take has to go up the chain of command to the top of the management bureaucracy.
C) discouraging lower-level managers and rank-and-file employees from exercising initiative, engaging in creative thinking, and taking responsibility for their actions.
D) putting the organization at risk if many "bad" decisions are made at lower levels in the organization-top management lacks "full control."
E) creating more layers of management.

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A) converting the strategy (and any associated strategic plan) into actions and good results.
B) empowering employees to revise and reorganize value chain activities to match the strategy.
C) establishing policies and procedures that instruct company personnel in the ways and means of executing the strategy.
D) developing a detailed implementation plan that sets forth exactly what every department and every manager needs to do to proficiently execute the company's strategy.
E) building the core competencies and competitive capabilities needed to execute the strategy.

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A) quick creation of distinctive competencies, enhanced product quality, and better customer service.
B) lower costs, less internal bureaucracy, speedier decision-making, more flexibility, and heightened strategic focus.
C) lower cost adoption of best practices.
D) reduced need to empower employees and rely on team-based organizational arrangements.
E) facilitating the capture of cross-functional strategic fits and resource fits.

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A) Core competencies or capabilities are most often bundles of skills and know-how that grow out of the combined efforts of cross-functional work groups and departments performing complementary activities at different locations in a firm's value chain.
B) Evolving changes in customer needs and competitive conditions often require tweaking and adjusting a company's portfolio of competencies and intellectual capital to keep its capabilities freshly honed and on the cutting edge.
C) Normally core competencies and competitive capabilities emerge incrementally as a company (1) acts to bolster skills that contributed to earlier successes or (2) acts to respond to customer problems, new technological or market opportunities, and the competitive maneuvers of rivals.
D) Building organizational capabilities is best and most cost-effectively accomplished by hiring a cadre of people with the right talent and expertise, putting them together in a single work group, and then teaming the work group with key strategic allies/partners to mesh the skills, expertise, and competencies needed to perform the desired capabilities with some proficiency.
E) The key to leveraging a core competence into a distinctive competence (or transforming a capability into a competitively superior capability) is concentrating more effort and talent than rivals on deepening and strengthening the competence or capability so as to achieve the dominance needed for competitive advantage.

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A) decision-making authority should be put in the hands of the people closest to and most familiar with the situation, and these people should be trained to exercise good judgment.
B) a command-and-control organizational scheme is the lowest cost way to organize the work effort.
C) top executives oftentimes lack the expertise and wisdom to decide what is the wisest and best course of action.
D) the best decisions emerge from a collegial, collaborative culture where decisions are made by general consensus (at least a majority vote) on what to do and when.
E) organizing into work teams, having team members elect a team leader, and having team members vote on the best way to do things greatly reduces corporate bureaucracy.

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