Deck 8: Realizing Stategy

Question 1

Bureaucratic control results in many employees feeling alienated-less than fully human-and resentful or disconnected from the firm's goals.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

There is a very clear distinction between formulating a plan and carrying it out.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

There is NOT usually much difference between a planned strategy and its realization.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

According to the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, BP's actual culture, structure, and systems affected the way it appraised risks in the Gulf of Mexico.

Question 5

A strategic plan typically includes the history of how the firm got to its current position and detailed financial calculations of the consequences of the firm's strategic decisions.

Question 6

Information Systems should provide feedback on job performance and information networking, which allows staff to coordinate their actions without any hierarchy.

Question 7

Departments within a firm rarely have their own departmental goals conflicting with other departments' goals; they are exclusively driven by the firm's overall goals.

Question 8

In this chapter we examine how three key factors shape and are shaped by strategy:

A)purpose, structure, and culture.
B)values, structure and culture.
C)systems, structure and culture.
D)structure, structure and structure - it's all about structure!

Question 9

Plans will come to nothing unless they influence the way people behave.

Question 10

Hierarchies allow units to work independently of each other.

Question 11

Corporate culture has been defined as "The way things don't get done around here".

Question 12

Strong cultures encourage loyalty by appealing to employees' heads, reasoning that they will be better off if the firm is better off.

Question 13

Strong bureaucratic controls reduce the freedom of junior employees to exercise personal judgments.

Question 14

Reconciling the need to divide labour into specialized tasks and to coordinate it to achieve the task is the central problem of external stakeholders in any organization.

Question 15

Large organizations are typically made up of many sub-cultures.

Question 16

Realized strategies are a mix of

A)practice and theory.
B)unintended and intended actions.
C)intended and unintended successes.
D)dreams, despair, and cynical calculation.

Question 17

This chapter focuses on the things that influence the way a strategy is realised.

Question 18

An organization's structure, systems, and culture can influence the way a strategy is realized in practice.

Question 19

Having a hierarchy raises the number of worker interactions, increasing communication costs.

Question 20

Analysts discuss the best ways to achieve 'coordination' and 'cooperation', but the difference between the two depends on which academic school you belong to.

Question 21

In an adhocracy a person

A)specializes in one role.
B)performs at least two roles simultaneously.
C)switches between roles as needed by the team at that period in the project's life.
D)has no role at all, but performs whichever task the group decides to do that day.

Question 22

Ways to group employees in international multiproduct companies include by

A)geography, products, processes, and people.
B)geography, products, tasks and people.
C)geography, products, tasks and processes.
D)geography, products, stars and cash cows.

Question 23

A matrix structure means a firm is formally organized by

A)executive committees.
B)products, geography and functions simultaneously.
C)products, functions and structure simultaneously.
D)either a or c.

Question 24

Share option schemes go wrong when

A)bad senior managers manipulate reported profits.
B)customers and suppliers cut out the firm and deal with each other directly.
C)employees sue the government.
D)Employees become customers.

Question 25

Total Quality Management requires that employees receive

A)regular, timely, feedback on their performance.
B)regular, timely, feedback on the quality of the whole firm's output.
C)immediate quality control reports.
D)reports that predict future quality.

Question 26

The main components of financial plans are

A)the Income Statement and the Balance Sheet.
B)the Balance Sheet and the Cash Flow forecast.
C)the capital budget and the operating budget.
D)all of the above.

Question 27

The commonest ways to achieve coordination are to use

A)laws, deterrents and an internal 'police force'.
B)frequent short meetings with tight agendas.
C)rules, routines and mutual adjustment.
D)b and c.

Question 28

A good strategic plan is less important than

A)a good month's financial results.
B)the process of strategic planning.
C)a good Chief Finance Officer.
D)a good Chief Human Resources Officer.

Question 29

The practical importance of budgets is that

A)senior executives and divisional managers are held accountable against the figures in these budgets.
B)the CEO is accountable to shareholders and analysts against these detailed predictions.
C)the individual figures don't matter, it is the process by which the numbers were reached that matters.
D)a and b.

Question 30

Well-designed share options can be a way of aligning the

A)interests of managers with those of shareholders.
B)customers' interests with those of suppliers'.
C)employees' interests with those of government.
D)customers' interests with those of employees.

Question 31

An adhocracy describes the kind of structure found in

A)a modern retail chain of supermarkets.
B)a research lab or new product development group - such as much of Google or Microsoft.
C)a prestigious firm of Latin-speaking lawyers.
D)a private hedge fund of financial traders with clear trading rules and limits.

Question 32

By persuading employees to adopt common values of the firm's culture, managers aim to

A)brainwash their gullible juniors.
B)get all employees to align their actions to achieve company goals independently - reducing the need for close supervision.
C)persuade employees to buy the firm's shares.
D)propagate their own moral and religious views.

Question 33

The 200-year-old quote from Adam Smith's early industrial pin factory illustrates

A)the gains to be had from task specialization.
B)the usefulness of 200-year-old economics textbooks.
C)how technology has progressed in 200 years.
D)a and b.

Question 34

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill taught us that

A)giant firms are often too ambitious.
B)even the most professional risk plans can ignore some major risks.
C)confused responsibilities can emerge from trying to coordinate complex teams and systems.
D)b and c.

Question 35

Whether formal or informal, all strategic planning systems

A)describe the company's ultimate goals.
B)map stakeholders' influence on the company.
C)coordinate financial results within a company.
D)coordinate plans within a company.

Question 36

A functional structure means individual departments

A)provide only a basic service to all the others.
B)do the same kind of activity or task.
C)adopt the same general approach.
D)focus on producing one product each.

Question 37

The coordination problem is

A)aligning the outputs of different divisions in a group.
B)harmonizing the conflicting requirements of marketing, financial and operational plans.
C)uniting the conflicting goals of all the firm's stakeholders.
D)unless employees coordinate their efforts nothing will get produced.

Question 38

HR Management systems need to

A)record who is on the payroll and how much they get paid.
B)keep a track of sick leave and holidays due and taken.
C)monitor each employee's performance every day.
D)set goals, create incentives, and monitor the performance of every individual.

Question 39

The 'cooperation problem' is

A)how to persuade customers to cooperate with each other when supplies are scarce.
B)how to get workers to coordinate their actions so that something is produced on time.
C)how to align the interests of the different participants who make up a firm.
D)how to get rival commercial firms to cooperate during disasters or emergencies.

Question 40

In a multidivisional structure each division is responsible for

A)a major market or country.
B)a major function or task of the firm.
C)all functions necessary to produce one range of products.
D)either a or b.

Question 41

At BP, before Deepwater Horizon, drilling risks were evaluated

A)differently by managers and engineers, who belonged to different sub-cultures.
B)by big game hunters who 'shot from the hip'.
C)by managers who were too frightened.
D)by people on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Question 42

Schein says that corporate culture can be understood

A)at three levels: artificial constructs, values, and explicit statements.
B)at three levels: artefacts, values, and tacit beliefs.
C)as being at the intersection of personal, corporate, and national values.
D)the acme of inimitable competitive advantage.

Question 43

In a weak culture

A)people interpret a senior manager's statement or signal differently.
B)people hold contrary views on how they should behave at work.
C)a, b or both.
D)non-aggression and meekness are espoused and practiced by all staff.

Question 44

Corporate culture typically means

A)the firm's official ethical position on issues such as bribery, equal rights, and the environment.
B)the values and ways of thinking the firm's senior managers wish to encourage.
C)a derogatory term for junior employees, likening them to a growth on a Petri dish.
D)the diverse cultural patterns that exist in the informal organization.

Question 45

The hypothetical link between culture and a company's performance has NOT been statistically demonstrated yet because

A)it's a very weak link at best.
B)it's such an indirect link: culture affects people which affects actions which affect financial results.
C)no one can control a company's culture: it just grows, or not, as fate determines.
D)both 'culture' and 'relative company performance' are hard to measure statistically across many firms.

Question 46

To bring labour specialization to a productive conclusion, firms need to implement structures and systems that

A)command and control employees.
B)control and coordinate employees.
C)coordinate and command employees.
D)make employees coordinate their actions and cooperate with other stakeholders.

Question 47

The basis for different structures is different ways of organizing

A)the Board of Directors.
B)the firm's core processes.
C)hierarchies within the firm.
D)relationships between departments.

Question 48

Johnson says that a corporate culture includes a firm's

A)mission and values, rituals, routines and myths.
B)human resource goals, values and stories.
C)marketing objectives, strategic goals and financial targets.
D)b and c.

Question 49

To sum up, strategy in practice may differ from top management's vision

A)but not by much.
B)because staff enact it, and they are influenced by the firm's structure, systems and culture around them.
C)because staff enact it but they are not as experienced as top managers.
D)because top management has failed to explain sufficiently clearly what it wants.

Question 50

After BP moved from strategic controls to financial controls,

A)financial controllers like John Brown rose to the top.
B)environmental worries were completely ignored.
C)operational managers were being asked to trade off savings that were certain against risks they thought very unlikely.
D)the company withdrew from all risky exploration activities.

Question 51

A firm's culture could be shown by

A)the way a customer complaint is handled.
B)the firm's profitability.
C)the growth rate of profits.
D)how rapidly its financial results are produced.

Question 52

One might expect corporate culture to be at least partly summarized in

A)a firm's Prospectus to Shareholders.
B)the latest quarterly earnings statement.
C)the staff handbook given to all new joiners.
D)a firm's Disciplinary Procedures.

Question 53

The main management systems that can affect how strategy is implemented are

A)information and human resource management systems.
B)strategic and financial planning systems.
C)a and b.
D)strategic, financial, operational and marketing planning systems.