Exam 12: Strategic Leadership

The goal of investing in human capital is to:

What are organizational controls? Why are strategic controls and financial controls important aspects of the strategic management process?

When the top management team is homogeneous and a new CEO is selected from inside the firm, it is:

A heterogeneous top management team is composed of individuals with:

Exploiting and maintaining core competencies is part of the key strategic leadership action "Effectively Managing the Firm's Resource Portfolio." Which of the following is most important for developing and using core competencies?

The effective development and management of the firm's ____ may be its only sustainable competitive advantage.

Which of the statements about CEO duality is FALSE?

The firm's envisioned future encourages employees to stretch beyond their expectations of accomplishment and requires significant change and progress to be realized.

Organizational culture is a complex set of ideologies, symbols, and core values that are shared throughout the firm, but its development is so subtle and poorly understood that top managers cannot influence its content.

The CEO/chairman of PharmaPacifica was recently killed in an airplane crash. This tragedy has thrown PharmaPacifica into turmoil as there is no one in the organization qualified to step into the former CEO's shoes. This is an example of:

The advantages of long tenure (firm-specific human and social capital, knowledge, and power) seem to outweigh the disadvantages of rigidity and maintaining the status quo.

Strategic leadership is the ability to anticipate, envision, maintain flexibility, and empower others to create strategic change as necessary.

The training of future strategic leaders yields a competitive advantage for a firm, in part because knowledge and skills are necessary for successful execution of strategy.

Which of the following will increase the probability that a lower-level manager will become a successful strategic leader?

The premise of the balanced scorecard is that firms jeopardize future performance possibilities when they:

For 15 years, Edward was a compensation specialist at a mid-sized firm. He was laid off when the firm experienced financial setbacks. Edward has decided to open his own business as a compensation consultant to small firms. He can expect that his main source of human capital will be a bank line of credit.

The underlying premise of the balanced scorecard is that firms jeopardize their future performance possibilities when strategic controls are emphasized at the expense of financial controls.

Billy Kroghmen is the son of a very prominent Fortune 500 CEO. Billy has had troubles. He failed out of multiple colleges, universities, and correspondence schools. He finally received his undergraduate degree from a university with only a post office box for an address. He then enrolled in the school's combined graduate accounting and law school programs, graduating with honor with degrees in both areas. After graduation, he twice failed both the CPA and bar exams, managing to set record low scores on the ethics portions of both. Despite these academic setbacks, Billy's career now seems to be thriving. He has been appointed to a number of "blue ribbon" government committees, is on the Board of Directors of two corporations and one prestigious not-for-profit organization. In at least one instance, a donor credited Billy with the idea for making a large contribution to the not-for-profit. Widespread speculation is that his career advancement is based largely on social relationships through friends and family. We would classify Billy as ____ on ____ capital, and ____ on ____ capital.

Including talent from both the internal and external labor markets increases the likelihood that the firm will be able to form an effective top management team.

Discuss how the managerial succession process and the composition of the top management team interact to affect strategy.