CSM Strategic Planning & Execution 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: During strategic execution, a mid-level manager notices that frontline employees are unaware of the company's three-year strategic priorities. This BEST illustrates a failure in:
- Environmental scanning
- Strategic communication and cascade (Correct answer)
- Competitive benchmarking
- Financial budgeting
Correct answer: Strategic communication and cascade
Strategic cascade ensures that high-level strategy is communicated, translated, and understood at every organizational level to enable aligned execution.
Question 2: A company pursuing a 'blue ocean strategy' is primarily seeking to:
- Outperform rivals in an existing market through cost leadership
- Create uncontested market space by making competition irrelevant (Correct answer)
- Acquire competitors to consolidate market share
- Defend an existing market position against new entrants
Correct answer: Create uncontested market space by making competition irrelevant
Blue Ocean Strategy, by Kim and Mauborgne, focuses on creating new demand in uncontested market space rather than competing in existing saturated markets.
Question 3: Which of Porter's Five Forces addresses the threat posed by companies outside an industry offering substitute products?
- Bargaining power of buyers
- Threat of new entrants
- Threat of substitutes (Correct answer)
- Competitive rivalry
Correct answer: Threat of substitutes
The threat of substitutes examines how easily customers can switch to alternative products or services from different industries that fulfill the same need.
Question 4: In strategic planning, 'scenario planning' is MOST useful when:
- The future environment is highly predictable and stable
- Historical data is sufficient to forecast all outcomes
- The external environment is highly uncertain with multiple plausible futures (Correct answer)
- The organization wants to focus only on the most likely outcome
Correct answer: The external environment is highly uncertain with multiple plausible futures
Scenario planning helps organizations prepare for multiple plausible futures rather than relying on a single forecast, making it ideal for high-uncertainty environments.
Question 5: The 'strategy map' concept associated with the Balanced Scorecard is PRIMARILY used to:
- Document competitor strategies in a visual format
- Show cause-and-effect relationships between strategic objectives across perspectives (Correct answer)
- Map geographic market territories
- Track daily operational KPIs
Correct answer: Show cause-and-effect relationships between strategic objectives across perspectives
A strategy map visually depicts how an organization creates value by linking objectives across the financial, customer, internal process, and learning & growth perspectives.
Question 6: A company sets its strategic objectives for the next five years. Which planning horizon is this BEST classified as?
- Operational planning
- Tactical planning
- Strategic planning (Correct answer)
- Contingency planning
Correct answer: Strategic planning
Strategic planning typically covers a long-term horizon (3–10 years) and addresses the overall direction, goals, and resource allocation of the organization.
Question 7: When using Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment), the 'catchball' process refers to:
- A random selection of strategic priorities
- An iterative dialogue between management levels to refine and align goals (Correct answer)
- A method for eliminating low-performing business units
- A technique for benchmarking competitors
Correct answer: An iterative dialogue between management levels to refine and align goals
Catchball is a collaborative back-and-forth process in Hoshin Kanri where goals and action plans are passed between organizational levels for refinement and buy-in.
CSM Strategic Planning & Execution 3
During strategic execution, a mid-level manager notices that frontline employees are unaware of the company's three-year strategic priorities.
This BEST illustrates a failure in: