Strategic Management Flashcards
7 cards from real MEM practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Strategic Management flashcards as text
A company faces a 'prisoner's dilemma' in competitive strategy when:
Answer: Both firms would be better off cooperating, but self-interest drives them to compete destructively
The prisoner's dilemma illustrates how rational self-interest leads competing firms to mutually destructive outcomes when cooperation would benefit both.
The primary purpose of scenario planning in strategic management is to:
Answer: Prepare the organization to respond to multiple plausible future environments
Scenario planning develops distinct narratives of possible futures so that strategies remain robust across a range of conditions, not just the expected case.
In the BCG Growth-Share Matrix, a business unit classified as a 'dog' is characterized by:
Answer: Low market growth and low relative market share
Dogs have low growth and low share, generating minimal cash and offering little strategic opportunity, making divestiture a common recommendation.
Strategic leadership in engineering firms requires balancing 'exploitation' and 'exploration.' These terms respectively refer to:
Answer: Improving existing operations and pursuing new innovations
Exploitation refines and extends current competencies for near-term performance, while exploration develops new capabilities for future competitiveness.
Which of the following BEST describes a 'corporate parenting advantage'?
Answer: A parent company's ability to add more value to its business units than any other owner could
Corporate parenting advantage exists when headquarters adds more value to its portfolio businesses—through resources, capabilities, or coordination—than alternative owners would.
An engineering firm's 'dynamic capabilities' are best described as its ability to:
Answer: Sense opportunities, seize them, and reconfigure resources as the environment changes
Dynamic capabilities, as defined by Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, enable firms to build, integrate, and reconfigure competencies to address rapidly changing environments.
A competitor analysis using a 'war gaming' approach differs from standard competitor profiling because it:
Answer: Simulates how competitors will react to your strategic moves in real time
War gaming role-plays competitor responses to test strategic decisions under realistic adversarial conditions before committing resources.