Question 1:

Which one of the following is not part of conducting a SWOT analysis?

A. Drawing conclusions about the company’s overall business situation
B. Benchmarking the company’s resource strengths and competitive capabilities against industry
key success factors
C. Identifying a company’s market opportunities
D. Identifying a company’s resource strengths and competitive capabilities
E. Matching the company’s strategy to its resource strengths and market opportunities, correcting
problematic weaknesses, and defending against worrisome threats

Question 2:
A company’s resources are competitive assets that are owned or controlled by the company and include
A. intangible assets such as having a results-oriented culture.
B. financial resources such as a company’s credit rating and borrowing capacity.
C. tangible resources such as plants, distribution centers, and manufacturing equipment.
D. All of these
E. intangible assets such as brand recognition and buyer loyalty.

Question 3:
The competitive power of a company resource or competitive capability hinges on
A. All of these
B. whether it is really competitively valuable.
C. whether it is rare and, therefore, something rivals lack.
D. how easily it can be trumped by the substitute resources/capabilities of rivals.
E. how hard it is for competitors to copy or imitate

Question 4:
Two analytical tools useful in determining whether a company’s prices and costs are competitive are
A. competitive position assessment and competitive strength assessment.
B. SWOT analysis and key success factor analysis.
C. driving forces analysis and SWOT analysis.
D. value chain analysis and benchmarking.
E. SWOT analysis and benchmarking.

Question 5:
A company that lacks a stand-alone resource that is competitively powerful may attempt to develop a
competitive advantage through
A. the development of a new business strategy that draws upon existing resource strengths.
B. improved employee training programs, new marketing promotions, or technological enhancements to
production processes.
C. devising clever approaches to turning resource weaknesses into resource strengths.
D. extensive strategic planning and resource identification sessions involving managers at all levels of the
organization.
E. bundled resources that enable superior performance of cross-functional capabilities that can be
leveraged to support its business model and strategy

Question 6:
Benchmarking involves
A. checking whether a company has achieved more of its financial and strategic objectives over the past
five years relative to the other firms it is in direct competition with.
B. studying how a company’s competitive capabilities stack up against the competitive capabilities of
selected companies known to have world-class competitive capabilities.
C. comparing the best practices in one industry against the best practices in another industry.
D. studying whether a company’s resource strengths are more/less powerful than the resource strengths of
rival companies.
E. comparing how different companies perform various value chain activities and then making
cross-company comparisons of the costs of these activities.

Question 7:
One important indicator of how well a company’s present strategy is working is whether
A. it has been able to create new industry demand through the use of a blue ocean strategy.
B. it is subject to weaker competitive forces and pressures than close rivals (a good sign).
C. its strategy is built around at least two of the industrys key success factors.
D. it has more core competencies than close rivals.
E. the company is achieving gains in financial strength.

Question 8:
Which of the following is not one of the five questions that comprise the task of evaluating a company’s
competitive strength and cost structure?
A. What strategic issues and problems merit front-burner management attention?
B. How well is the company’s strategy working?
C. Is the company’s cost structure and customer value proposition competitive?
D. What are the company’s most profitable geographic market segments?
E. Is the company competitively stronger or weaker than key rivals?

Question 9:
When a company performs a particular competitively important activity truly well in comparison to its
competitors, it is said to have
A. a distinctive competence.
B. a core competence.
C. a strategic resource.
D. a resource-based strategy.
E. a competence.

Question 10:
A resource-based strategy
A. uses a company’s valuable and rare resources and competitive capabilities to deliver value to
customers that rivals have difficulty matching.
B. is often based on cross-department combinations of intellectual capital and expertise.
C. uses industry key success factors to provide a company with a core competence that rivals cannot
effectively imitate.
D. is typically based on a stand-alone resource strength such as technological expertise.
E. refers to a company’s most efficiently executed value-chain activity.
Question 11:
When a company is good at performing a particular internal activity, it is said to have
A. a competitive advantage over rivals.
B. a competitive capability.
C. a distinctive competence.
D. a resource-based strategy.
E. a competence

Question 12:
Which of the following is not a component of evaluating a company’s competitive strength and cost
structure?
A. Scanning the environment to determine a company’s best and most profitable customers
B. Assessing whether the company’s costs and prices are competitive
C. Evaluating how well the strategy is working
D. Pinpointing what strategic issues and problems merit front-burner management attention
E. Evaluating whether the company is competitively stronger or weaker than key rivals

Question 13:
Every organization has many resources, capabilities and routines however those few things the company
does really well and are performed with a very high proficiency are termed
A. Socially complex activities
B. Sustainable activities
C. Distinct capabilities
D. Core competencies
E. Distributive factors

Question 14:
In order to sustain the competitive power of resources and capabilities they must be
A. refreshed, modified, or sometimes phased out and replaced in response to ongoing market changes.
B. difficult to imitate.
C. All of these
D. continually strengthened and nurtured.
E. broadened and deepened to cover emerging market opportunities.

Question 15:
Identifying and appraising a company’s resource strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities
and threats is called
A. strategic resource assessment.
B. SWOT analysis.
C. competitive asset/liability analysis.
D. company resource mapping.
E. competitive positioning analysis.

Question 16:
Sizing up a company’s overall resource strengths and weaknesses
A. is called company resource mapping.
B. essentially involves constructing a strategic balance sheet where the company’s resource
strengths represent competitive assets and its resource weaknesses represent competitive liabilities.
C. is focused squarely on ascertaining whether the company has more/less resource strengths than
weaknesses.
D. is called benchmarking.
E. is called competitive strength assessment.

Question 17:
Which one of the following is inaccurate as concerns a distinctive competence?
A. A distinctive competence has potential for being the cornerstone of the company’s strategy.
B. A distinctive competence gives a company competitively valuable capability that is unmatched by
rivals.
C. A distinctive competence is a competitively important activity that a company performs better than its
competitors.
D. A distinctive competence is typically less difficult for rivals to copy than a core competence.
E. A distinctive competence can be a basis for sustainable competitive advantage.

Question 18:
A company’s value chain identifies
A. the competencies and competitive capabilities that underpin its efforts to create value for customers
and shareholders.
B. the primary activities that create value for customers and related support activities.
C. the activities it performs in transforming its competencies into distinctive competencies.
D. the series of steps it takes to get a product from a raw materials stage to a finished product.
E. the steps it goes through to convert its net income into value for shareholders.

Question 19:
The value of doing competitive strength assessment is to
A. learn whether a company has a distinctive competence.
B. learn if the company’s market opportunities are better than those of its rivals.
C. determine how competitively powerful the company’s core competencies are.
D. determine whether a company’s resource strengths are sufficient to allow it to earn bigger profits than
rivals.
E. learn how the company ranks relative to rivals on each of the important factors that determine
market success and ascertain whether the company has a net competitive advantage or
disadvantage vis-à-vis key rivals

Question 20:
For a particular company resource to have meaningful competitive power and perhaps qualify as a basis
for competitive advantage, it should
A. be patentable.
B. be competitively important, hard for competitors to copy or imitate, rare and something rivals
lack, and not be easily trumped by the substitute resources/capabilities of rivals.
C. be something that a company does internally rather than in collaborative arrangements with outsiders.
D. have the potential for lowering the firm’s unit costs.
E. be rooted in the company’s organizational capital, information capital, or human capital.