Deck 1: Overview of Clinical Chemistry

Question 1

How do the three elements of globalization, innovation, and sustainability impact your understanding of strategy?

Answer 1

Globalization is the integrated internationalization of markets and corporations. As more industries become global, strategic management is becoming more important in keeping track of international developments and positioning a company for long-term competitive advantage. Innovation is meant to describe new products, services, methods, and organizational approaches that would position a company to achieve strong returns. Sustainability refers to a set of business practices that focus on the triple bottom line for an organization. Each of these is a new frontier that is impacting the way in which businesses develop and implement strategy.

Question 2

Define strategic flexibility and explain its implications. Why is organizational learning important to the long-term development of strategic flexibility of organizations that intend to enter overseas markets?

Answer 2

Corporations need to develop strategic flexibility, which is the ability to shift from one dominant strategy to another. Strategic flexibility requires an organization to commit to the long-term development of important and critical resources. It requires that the company become a learning organization, which is an organization skillful in creating, innovating, and transferring knowledge, and readjusting its behavior to reflect new knowledge and ideas. Organizational learning is a critical component of competitiveness in a dynamic environment. It is particularly important to innovation as well as new product development.
Strategic management through continuous self-improvement is essential for learning organizations to avoid sluggishness. Organizational employees at all levels participate in strategic management by helping to study and analyze the environment for useful information, suggesting changes to strategies and programs to take advantage of environmental changes. They can then work effectively with each other to continuously improve work methods, procedures, and evaluation techniques.

Question 3

Does every business firm have business strategies?

Answer 3

Every business firm should have a business strategy for every industry or market segment it serves. A business strategy aims at improving the competitive position of a business firm's products or services in a specific industry or market segment. Firms must therefore have business strategies even if they are not organized on the basis of operating divisions. Nevertheless, it is still possible that some business firms do not have clearly stated business strategies. If they hope to be successful, however, they must have at least some rudimentary (even though unstated) position they take in terms of getting and keeping customers or clients.

Question 4

Why is strategic management considered important for global market competition?

Question 5

Why are strategic decisions different from other kinds of decisions?

Question 6

What is the most preferred planning mode of strategic decision making for organizations competing internationally?

Question 7

Describe the triple bottom line.

Question 8

What is meant by a hierarchy of strategy?

Question 9

How does strategic management typically evolve in a company?

Question 10

What information is needed for the proper formulation of strategy? Why?

Question 11

Organizational strategy can be divided roughly into two categories:
a) formulation and
b) implementation. Although there is legitimate crossover between the two, how would you characterize the issues involved in each effort?