Exam 3: The Internal Organization: Resources, Capabilities, Core Competencies, and Competitive Advantages

Subscriptions to the New York Times have been decreasing as more customers receive their news through other media.  At the same time, advertisers have shifted portions of their spending to other media.  The NYT's managers are making decisions under:

Costly-to-imitate capabilities can emerge for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

Technology has made it more difficult for companies to find ways to develop competitive advantages.

The proper matching of what a firm can do with what it might do:

Capabilities that other firms cannot develop easily are classified as:

Analyzing the internal environment enables a firm to determine what it might do by identifying what opportunities and threats exist.

Organizational culture is:

Resources are the source of capabilities, some of which lead to the development of core competencies.  In turn, some core competencies may lead to competitive advantage.

A financial management firm has existed for more than 70 years. Some of its original clients' grandchildren are now clients of the firm themselves. The partners and staff of the firm have spent most or all of their careers with the firm. Many have even married into each other's families. This firm has capabilities that would be costly to imitate because of its

The critical executive skill of the current business age is the ability to:

Gamma, Inc., has struggled for industry dominance with Ardent, Inc., its main competitor, for years. Gamma has gathered and analyzed large amounts of competitive intelligence about Ardent. It has observed as much of the firm's internal functioning and technology as it can legally, yet Gamma cannot understand why Ardent has a competitive advantage over it. The source of Ardent's success is

Which of the following is NOT required for a firm to achieve strategic competitiveness and earn above-average returns from its core competencies?

A firm should outsource only activities where it cannot create value or where it is at a substantial disadvantage compared to competitors.

The firm with the most capabilities wins.

Firms should never outsource a primary activity because of the danger of the activity being imitated by rivals.

Compared to tangible resources, intangible resources are an inferior source of core competencies.

Although an organization's good reputation is a valuable resource that takes years of superior marketplace competence to achieve, it is not a good basis for building a competitive advantage because it can be destroyed almost instantly by bad publicity.

Older employees are less valuable resources to firms than younger employees, because older employees have lower levels of knowledge. Consequently, employee layoffs should begin with early-retirement inducements.

A product's value is created by each of the following EXCEPT: 

A food bank in Florida was struggling to serve its customers.  It asked Walmart for help.  Walmart sent a team of managers who reorganized storage and transportation.  The food bank was able to increase the number of clients served by tenfold.  Walmart shared its expertise in: