Exam 5: Business-Level Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantages

Improving business processes by reengineering them, benchmarking specific activities against industry leaders, encouraging employee input to identify excess costs, increasing capacity utilization, and improving employee productivity lead to a significant overall gain. These are examples of which turnaround strategy used by successful companies?

Too much focus on one or a few value-chain activities can be a pitfall of the overall cost leadership strategy.

Piecemeal productivity improvements during a turnaround typically do not involve

A potential pitfall of a focus strategy is that highly focused product and service offerings are not subject to competition from new entrants and from imitation.

Many firms facing a turnaround situation try to reduce their costs by outsourcing the production of many inputs.

Which of the following is not a reason for the possible erosion of company competitive advantage?

Support value chain activities that involve excellent applications engineering support (technology development) and facilities that promote a positive firm image (firm infrastructure) characterize which generic strategy?

Overhead costs associated with the number of layers of management in a firm are part of the _________ activities of the value chain.

The Yugo car was cheap, but it was poorly made. Consumers did not purchase it. This is an example of failure to attain parity on the basis of differentiation.

A business-level strategy is a strategy designed for a multi-business company that competes across multiple businesses.

Anderson Windows lowered costs, enhanced quality and variety, and improved its response time to customers by

Southwest Airlines uses an overall cost leadership strategy. This could fail if it

One potential pitfall of a differentiation strategy is that identification of the brand in the marketplace may become diluted through excessive product line extensions.

Competitive parity on the basis of differentiation permits a cost leader to maximize disadvantages and turn them into higher profits than competitors.

In technology intensive industries, the duration of competitive advantages is declining.

HSN CEO Mindy Grossman managed a successful turnaround by first engaging with employees.

In the textbook example of Atlas Door, human talent trained in the new just-in-time systems have little reason to leave the company and therefore this is a sustainable competitive advantage.

Atlas Door relies on technologies that are rather well known and non-proprietary. This opens it up to the potential of

An important issue in evaluating the sustainability of a unique strategy is whether or not rivals will be able to imitate its strategy or create a viable substitute.

Procter and Gamble successfully implemented a turnaround strategy by discontinuing brands and focusing all resources on a few core brands.