Chapter 6 - Terms Flashcards
Resources
the assets, capabilities, processes, employee time, information, and knowledge that an organization uses to improve its effectiveness and efficiency and create and sustain competitive advantage
Competitive advantage
providing greater value for customers than competitors can
Sustainable competitive advantage
a competitive advantage that other companies have tried unsuccessfully to duplicate and have, for the moment, stopped trying to duplicate
Valuable resource
a resource that allows companies to improve efficiency and effectiveness
Rare resource
a resource that is not controlled or possessed by many competing firms
Imperfectly imitable resource
a resource that is impossible or extremely costly or difficult for other firms to duplicate
Nonsubstitutable resource
a resource that produces value or competitive advantage and has no equivalent substitutes or replacements
Competitive inertia
a reluctance to change strategies or competitive practices that have been successful in the past
Strategic dissonance
a discrepancy between a company’s intended strategy and the strategic actions managers take when implementing that strategy
Situational (SWOT) analysis
an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses in an organization’s internal environment and the opportunities and threats in its external environment
Shadow-strategy task force
a committee within a company that analyzes the company’s own weaknesses to determine how competitors could exploit them for competitive advantage
Distinctive competence
what a company can make, do, or perform better than its competitors
Core capabilities
the internal decision-making routines, problem-solving processes, and organizational cultures that determine how efficiently inputs can be turned into outputs
Strategic group
a group of companies within an industry against which top managers compare, evaluate, and benchmark strategic threats and opportunities
Core firms
the central companies in a strategic group
Secondary firms
the firms in a strategic group that follow strategies related to but somewhat different from those of the core firms
Strategic reference points
the strategic targets managers use to measure whether a firm has developed the core competencies it needs to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage
Corporate-level strategy
the overall organizational strategy that addresses the question “What business or businesses are we in or should we be in?”
Diversification
a strategy for reducing risk by buying a variety of items (stocks or, in the case of a corporation, types of businesses) so that the failure of one stock or one business does not doom the entire portfolio
Portfolio strategy
a corporate-level strategy that minimizes risk by diversifying investment among various businesses or product lines