Exam 6: Organizational Strategy

​_____ is defined as the purchase of a company by another company.

Briefly identify the four conditions used to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by companies.

CLM is a big cable company. The company has recently declared bankruptcy and needs to engage in restructuring in order to give it more flexibility and allow it to raise capital. Since it has identified the need for strategic change, what would be the organization's next step in this strategy- making process?

Aries Inc. is a large a computer manufacturer which has been in the market for several years. Many other companies have started manufacturing compact, portable gadgets to keep up with the new technological developments. Aries, however, has been reluctant to adopt these changes because it thinks that its products are already popular. Which of the following concepts is illustrated in the scenario?

A(n) _____ strategy is a broad corporate-level strategic plan used to achieve strategic goals and guide the strategic alternatives that managers of individual businesses or subunits may use.

In any organization, the _____ are the less visible, internal decision-making routines, problem-solving processes, and organizational cultures that determine how efficiently inputs can be turned into outputs.

One of the important conditions that a firm must meet in order to gain a sustainable competitive advantage with its capital is:

The term _____ refers to the overall organizational strategy that addresses the question "What business or businesses are we in or should we be in?"

_____ are companies that do not follow a consistent adaptive strategy but instead respond to changes in the external environment after they occur.

In an attempt to stop declining profitability, Chimos Inc., a chemical company, removed petrochemical products from its production and concentrated on specialty chemicals, a less capital-intensive, less cyclical business. What type of a grand strategy was Chimos Inc. using?

The _____ is a portfolio strategy that managers use to categorize their corporation's businesses by growth rate and relative market share. This strategy helps them to decide how to invest corporate funds.

Identify Porter's five industry forces and their role in industry-level strategy. Identify which one among these five forces could be considered the central one, with its value impacted by the relative values of the four other forces.

In a situational analysis, a strategic group is a group of _____ that top managers choose for comparing, evaluating, and benchmarking their company's strategic threats and opportunities.

A strategic group is a group of other companies, within an industry, that top managers choose for comparing, evaluating, and benchmarking their company's strategic threats and opportunities.

_____ is a discrepancy between a company's intended strategy and the strategic actions managers take when actually implementing that strategy.

Corporate-level strategy is the overall organizational strategy that addresses the question "What business or businesses are we in or should we be in?"

Industry-level strategy is a corporate strategy that addresses the question "How should we compete against a particular firm in our industry?"

​_____ are companies that have a small share of a fast-growing market.

Based on the research evidence, related diversification appears to be a better strategy for portfolio management than unrelated diversification.

When videocassette recorders first became popular in the mid-1980s, a new form of mom-and-pop (i.e., small) business sprang up across the country: the video rental store. At the time, new videotapes of popular movies cost anywhere from $80-$200, and as the popularity of videocassette recorders grew, these small, independent video rental stores grew rapidly to meet the demand of consumers for inexpensive rentals of movies. There was considerable competition among them to be the first to have expensive, new movies available for rental. However, some stores disappointed customers by not having enough copies of new films when they were most in demand, i.e., upon their initial release on video. Within about 5 to 8 years of competition, most of these mom-and-pop video rental stores were ultimately put out of business by the large regional and national chains such as Blockbuster. Using the concept of sustainable competitive advantage along with the four conditions required to produce it, explain how such a transition from hundreds of independent mom-and-pop video stores to a few national chains could have taken place so quickly.