management
Summary of all the
answers on Ekowiki
Questions he might ask on the exam
, KU Leuven
Operational effectiveness is about constant improvement.
Strategy is creating fit among the company’s activities.
Organisational effectiveness is about improvement of individual activities.
Improving its organisational effectiveness moves the firm towards the
productivity frontier.
Companies can simultaneously improve their nonprice buyer value
delivered and relative cost position: as companies move towards the
productivity frontier, they can improve on multiple dimensions of
performance at the same time. When operating at the frontier, however,
simultaneous improvements become very difficult and require trade-offs.
According to Porter, the essence of strategy is in the activities: having a
clear strategy involves choosing to perform activities differently or to
perform different activities than rivals.
Strategic fit enhances the sustainability of competitive advantage:
strategic fit is the fundamental to the sustainability of competitive
advantage. It is harder for a rival to match an array of interlocked
activities than merely to imitate a single activity.
The SWOT analysis enables us to link a firm’s competences and resources
to environmental needs in order for them to be valuable.
A firm’s willingness to gamble relates to a firm’s choice whether to pursue
an opportunity which requires more developed distinctive competences in
the long run.
The assumption that finance capital is the scarce resource on which the
top management has to focus is one of the problems with the portfolio
planning approach.
To formulate a good strategy it is necessary to define a clear objective and
scope, but this is not sufficient.
A firm’s scope is about encouraging experimentation and initiative,
specifying where the firm will not go, three dimensions, namely
customer/offering, geographic location and vertical integration.
The process of developing a strategy should involve employees from all
levels of the hierarchy.
Industry structure drives competition and profitability. If the forces are
intense, almost no company in the industry earns attractive returns on
investments.