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
In a multi-business engineering corporation, a Strategic Business Unit (SBU) is best defined as:
Answer: A distinct business with its own competitors, customers, and strategy
An SBU is a semi-autonomous unit that operates in a defined market segment, competes against identifiable rivals, and develops its own business-level strategy.
The 'resource-based view' of the firm argues that competitive advantage stems primarily from:
Answer: Unique, valuable, and hard-to-imitate internal resources and capabilities
The resource-based view holds that sustained advantage comes from internal resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and well-organized.
An engineering firm pursuing a 'focus differentiation' strategy would typically target:
Answer: A narrow market segment where specialized expertise commands a premium
Focus differentiation concentrates on a niche segment and serves it with superior, specialized offerings that justify premium pricing.
Which tool is most useful for mapping the strategic positions of competitors in an industry?
Answer: Strategic group map
Strategic group maps plot competitors along key dimensions (e.g., price vs. product breadth) to reveal clusters of firms pursuing similar strategies.
When assessing whether to enter a new international market, an engineering firm using a PESTEL analysis would examine:
Answer: Political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal macro-factors
PESTEL analysis systematically scans the macro-environmental forces that shape opportunities and threats in a target market.
A technology company that invests heavily in R&D to build proprietary platforms that lock in developers is executing which type of strategy?
Answer: Ecosystem strategy
Ecosystem strategies build platforms and standards that attract complementary actors, creating network effects that reinforce the firm's central position.
In the context of organizational design supporting strategy, a 'matrix structure' is most appropriate when:
Answer: The firm must simultaneously balance functional expertise and project or geographic needs
Matrix structures allow dual reporting relationships that balance specialized functional depth with cross-functional project or market coordination.