Vital Corporate Strategy Interview Preparation Guide

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★ Vision could be regarded as the reason for making the trip, and selecting the intended destination.
★ Values influence the choice of path, the direction and speed of travel, and may even affect how you decide on your destination.
★ mission is the path it will travel.
★ Strategy defines the direction and speed it will travel.
★ Policies influence how the journey is made.
★ Tactics may be required if the path is blocked or is rougher than expected.

Values are the guiding beliefs about how you should operate. Core values reflect what is important to an organisation, and they may well be a factor in how the overall 'vision' is defined. They do not change from time to time and in different situations, and they underpin the culture of the organisation. With corporate social responsibility (CSR) becoming an increasingly important issue in many quarters, more and more firms are taking action to turn their organisation's values into a competitive asset.
Example:
★ Dedication to every client's success.
★ Innovation that matters, for our company and for the world.
★ Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.

Every strategy brings with it the risk that an individual's actions will pull the business off course. Here again, it's easy to fail to inoculate the business against this risk. As we will see, the trick is in setting clear boundaries.

To overcome such inertia, you must push people out of their comfort zones and spur them to innovate. I will provide a menu of techniques you can use to generate creative tension to ensure that everyone is thinking and acting like a winning competitor.

Top-performing companies ensure their corporate strategy is both intuitive and realistic. It should be easy to communicate internally and externally and also provide for an approach that can be acted on by all business units at all levels.

A solid corporate strategy appropriately anticipates risk, uncertainty and optional.

In developing a corporate strategy, companies should consider long cycles and macro-trends while ensuring their plan is resilient and adaptive in times of turbulence.

Corporate strategy needs to effectively allocate resources to the best investment opportunities, drive performance and raise expectations internally and externally, improve a company's competitive position and add value beyond the sum of its parts.

Building commitment is the implementation imperative. I will offer a menu of techniques to foster commitment to achieving shared goals. Or, if rewarding self-interest is more appropriate for your business, I will explore alternative approaches you should employ.

It's your job to ensure that your managers are tracking the right things by singling out those variables that spell the difference between strategic success and failure. Like the preceding two questions, the focus in this question is again on an adjective, this time the word critical.

Prioritizing core values should be the second pillar of your business strategy. For some companies, shareholders come first. For others, it may be employees. In other companies, it may be customers. There is no right or wrong, but choosing is necessary.

The first imperative and the heart of every successful strategy implementation-is allocating resources to customers. Continuously competing demands for resources from business units, support functions and external partners require a method for judging whether the allocation choices you have made are optimal.

* A) A general list of issues under each heading
* B) Focused on key issues and as specific as possible.
* C) Completed when an analysis of the external environment has been conducted.
* D) SWOT analysis is the best strategic management framework for analyzing the competitive positioning of an organization.

B) Focused on key issues and as specific as possible

* A) The business environment in which an organization operates
* B) The strategic capability of an organization
* C) The business environment and the strategic capability of an organization relative to its competitors
* D) External and organizational environments

C) The business environment and the strategic capability of an organization relative to its competitors

* A) The nearest geographical competitor
* B) The competitor who is 'best in class' wherever that may be.
* C) The competitor who is the best in the industry
* D) The nearest principal competitor

B) The competitor who is 'best in class' wherever that may be

* B) Organizational performance between firms/public sector organizations in the same industry or sector
* C) Organizational performance between firms/public sector organizations in different countries
* D) Organizational performance between different divisions of the firm

B) Organizational performance between firms/public sector organizations in the same industry or sector

* A) Core competences, unique resources, and dynamic capabilities
* B) Complexity, causal ambiguity and value to customers
* C) Complexity, causal ambiguity and rarity.
* D) Complexity, causal ambiguity and culture/history

D) Complexity, causal ambiguity and culture/history

* A) Unique resources and core competences
* B) Dynamic capabilities
* C) Operational excellence
* D) Strategic capabilities, which are valuable to buyers, rare, robust, and non-substitutable

D) Strategic capabilities, which are valuable to buyers, rare, robust, and non-substitutable

* A) Explicit knowledge, which is classified and formalized in a planned and systematic way
* B) Personal knowledge, which is hard to communicate and formalize
* C) Customer databases, market research reports, management reports.
* D) Collective and shared experience accumulated through systems, routines, and activities of sharing across the organization.

D) Collective and shared experience accumulated through systems, routines, and activities of sharing across the organization

* A) Linkages in the value network are exploited.
* B) Core competences are complex, ambiguous, and dependent on culture/history.
* C) Competences lie with specific individuals.
* D) Core competences lie in separate parts of the organization’s value chain.

A) Linkages in the value network are exploited.
B) Core competences are complex, ambiguous, and dependent on culture/history.

* A) Supply Costs, Experience, Product/Process Design, and Economies of Scale.
* B) Supply Costs & Economies of Scale.
* C) Product/Process Design and Economies of Scale
* D) Experience

A) Supply Costs, Experience, Product/Process Design, and Economies of Scale

* A) Vertical integration
* B) Adopting common quality standards internally and externally (with suppliers)
* C) Examining supplier specifications, common merchandising, applying quality management principles, or by collaborating with other organizations in the form of strategic alliances or joint ventures.
* D) Outsourcing customer service to India

C) Examining supplier specifications, common merchandising, applying quality management principles or by collaborating with other organizations in the form of strategic alliances or joint ventures

► A) A system to facilitate better time planning
► B) It is used in business process reengineering to show how the different activities of an organization are linked together.
► C) It is used to identify and understand strategic capability by mapping how the different activities of an organization are linked together.
► D) A list of activities undertaken by an organization

C) It is used to identify and understand strategic capability by mapping how the different activities of an organization are linked together

► A) Service, human resource management, marketing & sales, operations and outbound logistics
► B) Marketing & Sales, Operations, Outbound Logistics and Service
► C) Procurement, Firm Infrastructure, Human Resource Management, Technology Development, and Marketing & Sales
► D) Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing & Sales, and Service.

D) Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing & Sales and Service

► A) The fit between the organization and its environment
► B) Creating new opportunities by stretching and exploiting capabilities in new ways
► C) The skills of the senior management
► D) Utilizing all the resources of an organization to their full capacity

B) Creating new opportunities by stretching and exploiting capabilities in new ways