Building an Organization Capable of Good Strategy Execution

What is not an advantage of Decentralized Organizational Structures:

• Promotes greater motivation and involvement in the business on the part of more company personnel.

• Allows for fast response to market change.

• Eliminates potential for conflicting goals and actions on the part of lower-level managers.

• Encourages company employees to exercise initiative and act responsibly.

• Spurs new ideas and creative thinking.

Which of the following is a sign of an ideal manager?

• Have strong strategy implementation capabilities understand how to drive organization change

• Know how to motivate and lead the company down the path for first-rate strategy execution

• Strong social skills and high emotional intelligence

• All of them

Managerial actions to develop core competencies and competitive capabilities internally generally take one of two forms. What are they?

• Either strengthening the company's base of skills, knowledge, and experience or coordinating and integrating the efforts of various work groups and departments

• Either using developed dynamic capabilities or acquiring the capability from outside sources

•  Either putting in high incentive bonuses to reward individual employees who train hard to develop the desired capability or launching an extensive training effort to develop the capability quickly with newly hired employees

Executing strategy

• is primarily an operations-driven activity revolving around the management of people and business processes.

• tests a manager’s ability to direct organizational change and achieve continuous improvement in operations and business processes. 

• tests a manager’s ability to create and nurture a strategy-supportive culture. 

• tests a manager’s ability to consistently meet or beat performance targets. 

• All of these

The three components of building a capable organization are

• making periodic changes in the firm's internal organization to keep people from getting into a comfortable rut, instituting a decentralized approach to decision-making, and developing the appropriate competencies and capabilities.

•  staffing the organization, building core competencies and competitive capabilities, and structuring the organization and work effort.

• hiring a capable top management team, empowering employees, and establishing strategy-supportive corporate culture.

• putting a centralized decision-making structure in place, determining who should have responsibility for each value chain activity, and aligning the corporate culture with key policies, procedures, and operating practices.

Is "Spending considerable effort on screening and evaluating job applicants" considered one of the common practices among companies dedicated to recruiting, training and retaining?

• True

• False

Which of the following statements best describes the process of crafting a business strategy?

• Crafting a business strategy involves continually meeting or surpassing performance targets.

• Crafting a business strategy tests a manager's ability to instill discipline in colleagues.

• Crafting a business strategy is operations driven activity based on managing people.

• Crafting business strategy is based on the analysis of market conditions and the company's resources.

Building an organization capable of good strategy execution entails

• staffing the organization, building core competencies and competitive capabilities, and structuring the organization and work effort.

• decentralizing authority for performing strategy-critical value chain activities, establishing at least two distinctive competencies, and hiring talented employees.

• investing heavily in employee training, using an empowered organization design and organization structure in order to maximize labor productivity, and employing effective incentive compensation systems.

• centralizing authority in the hands of a chief strategy implementer so as to create the leadership authority for driving implementation forward at a rapid pace.

What is functional structure?

• is a combination structure in which the organization is organized along two or more dimensions at once for the purpose of enhancing cross-unit communication, collaboration, and coordination. 

• a decentralized structure consisting of a set of operating divisions organized along market, customer, product, or geographic lines, along with a central corporate headquarters.

• is one in which a central executive (often the owner-manager) handles all major decisions and oversees the operations of the organization with the help of a small staff.

• is one that is organized along functional lines, where a function represents a major component of the firm’s value chain

What is the advantage of acquiring capabilities through merger and acquisition?

•  Speed, since developing new capabilities internally can take many years of effort.

•  Empowerment, since you can capture the essence of the capability and refocus the firm.

•  Price, as it is always cheaper to buy a whole company and pull out the capabilities individually.

• Assets, as it the basis of the sale.

•  All of these.