Strategic Management Practice Flashcards

A comprehensive set of vocabulary-style flashcards based on lecture notes covering strategic management, outsourcing, global competition, ethics, and corporate culture.

Strategy for Cisco Systems Outsourcing

Designing production methods for contractors and keeping source code proprietary to mitigate the risk of losing strategic control and having core innovations imitated.

Core Principle of Strategic Offensives

Applying resources where rivals are least able to defend themselves.

Product information-only website

A strategy used to avoid channel conflict by directing customers to local dealers for purchases rather than selling directly.

Outsourcing Strategy Position

A shift that narrows the scope of a company's internal operations on the industry value chain.

Hollowing out

The biggest danger of outsourcing, which occurs when a company farms out too many or the wrong activities, thereby losing its own capabilities.

Defensive Strategy (Signaling)

Actions such as maintaining a war chest of cash and marketable securities to signal to challengers that strong retaliation is likely.

Sustainable First-Mover Advantage

Occurs when the first mover's customers face significant costs in switching to a rival's product.

Strategic Collaborative Arrangement

A partnership between companies that facilitates the achievement of an important business objective, such as remedying a competitive weakness.

Global Competition

A market environment where competitive conditions across markets are strongly linked.

Multicountry Competition

A market environment where competitive conditions across markets are not strongly linked.

Greenfield Venture (Internal Startup)

An international entry strategy involving the establishment of a wholly-owned subsidiary from the ground up.

Licensing Strategy

An entry strategy suitable for generating income from valuable technology while avoiding the risks of direct investment and large-scale rollouts.

Profit Sanctuary

A country market, such as Japan for certain electronics firms, where a company holds a dominant position and high profitability.

Nonfinancial Resource Fit

A situation where a parent company's capabilities do not match the needs of its business units, such as an industrial manufacturer struggling to guide a SaaS company.

Related Diversification Goal

To convert cross-business strategic fits into a competitive advantage to achieve a $1 + 1 = 3$ outcome.

Corporate Strategy

Strategy concerned with the overall scope of the firm and how to add value to its collection of businesses.

Business Strategy

Strategy focused on competing successfully within a single industry.

Ethical Universalism

An approach that draws on the collective views of multiple societies to establish global boundaries for ethical behavior.

Ethical Relativism

The view that ethical standards are determined by prevailing local cultures and that multinational corporations should adhere to local customs.

Integrative Social Contracts Theory

A theory suggesting that universal first-order norms against corruption take precedence over local customs or second-order norms.

Distinctive Competence

A level of proficiency in performing an activity that is superior to that of a company's rivals.

Dynamic Resource Management

The process where managers continually refresh and recalibrate capabilities to align with changing conditions.

Change Agents

Individuals who champion change, trigger it, and keep change initiatives moving forward.

Executional Excellence

Identified by CEOs as the number one challenge facing companies in strategy implementation.

Benchmarking

The practice of looking outward to identify best-in-class performance and creating a standard for measuring a company's own performance.

Kaizen

A practice closely associated with Total Quality Management (TQM) that focuses on small, continuous, and incremental improvements.

Politicized Culture

A company culture where managers guard decision-making power, distrust collaboration, and blame others for failures.

Adaptive Culture

A culture where employees are receptive to change because they perceive it as legitimate, fair, and consistent with core values.

Insular Culture

An inward-focused culture where a company with decades of dominance underestimates competitors and fails to adapt to customer needs.