4900 Midterm Notice Winter 2015

AP/ADMS 4900 Winter 2015 Midterm Information

Exam date and location information

The mid-term exam for all winter term sections of ADMS4900 is being held on Saturday, February 28th between 10 AM and 12 PM (noon). Locations for the individual sections are as follows:
Sections M and O  CLH ‘C’
Sections N, P and S  CLH ‘D’
Sections Q and R  CLH ‘E’

Students with legitimate and appropriately documented reasons (e.g. work conflicts, religious observation) for missing the scheduled mid-term exam shall be entitled to write a make-up/alternate exam on Wednesday, March 4th at 10 AM (location TBA). No further extensions shall be granted. For students with work conflicts, a note from your employer on company letterhead will suffice. The note must be submitted to your instructor no later than February 23rd. Students requiring religious accommodations or with confirmed class or exam conflicts must inform their instructor via e-mail no later than February 23rd.

For students who are ill, you must email their instructor to notify them of their illness before the exam starts on Saturday, February 28th. Also note that an Attending Physician’s Statement is an absolute requirement (i.e. a ‘doctor’s note’ is insufficient) and must be submitted to the Admin Studies office in room 282 ATK by 4 pm, Monday, March 2nd for you to be eligible to write the make-up exam. No further extensions shall be granted.

Format and coverage information

The following information will help you prepare for the exam and will provide other exam particulars. You should also plan on being at the exam room at least 10 minutes before the start of the exam so that you have the full time to complete the exam itself.

The exam is closed book [no dictionaries or electronic devices of any kind are permitted] and will consist of two parts as described below.

For the exam you are responsible for the following material from the text book whether it has been covered in class or not: text chapters 1 through 6, chapters 8 and 9, and the assigned pages from chapters 10 (pgs. 273-285) and 11 (pgs. 303-315). You do not need to worry about the cases or discussion from class beyond what is covered in the assigned text chapters. If it is not in the text book, it is not on the exam.

PART 1: will consist of 25 multiple choice questions worth one mark each. These questions will be drawn from the assigned chapters with at least two questions drawn from each of the assigned chapters.

PART 2: will consist of 5 short answer questions worth 5 marks each. The short answer questions will be more integrative in nature and scenario based. These will require some application of the material. These questions may be drawn from across all of the assigned chapters. Part marks will be awarded.

There are 50 total marks available on the exam that will be converted to a percentage grade out of 100.

To give you a flavor for the types of questions you might anticipate on the mid-term, consider the following questions taken from recent exams. (Pages where you should find the answers are identified, as they will be on the exam)

Multiple-choice questions

1. Which of the following correctly captures the relationships in an organization’s hierarchy of goals? [pg 21]

a) Policy  mission  visions  strategic objectives
b) Vision  mission  strategic objectives  departmental objectives/goals
c) Policy  vision  strategic objectives  departmental objectives/goals
d) Scope  scale  competitive advantage  objectives
e) Mission  vision  strategic objectives  departmental objectives/goals

2. McGahan (2004) describes four evolutionary trajectories of industry change on the basis of whether or not core assets and activities are threatened. Which type of change occurs when core assets are threatened but core activities do not face the threat of obsolescence? [pg 219]
a) Creative change
b) Intermediate change
c) Progressive change
d) Obsolescence change
e) Radical change

3. Social capital does not always have a positive effect on a firm. One example is when it creates a tendency not to question shared beliefs. This is known as: [pg 108]

a) Pied Piper effect
b) Consensus bias
c) Groupthink
d) Socialized norms
e) Conformity bias

4. The experience curve refers to how businesses ‘learn’ to lower costs as they gain experience with production processes. According to the relationship identified by the Boston Consulting Group, if the costs of production for the first 100 units was $50 per unit, the per unit cost would decline to X in the production of the next 100 units. What would X most likely equal? [pg 127]

a) $46
b) $40
c) $32
d) $25
e) $15

5. There are four basic strategies available during the decline phase of the industry life cycle. These include all of the following, except: [pg 222]

a) Harvesting
b) Exiting the market
c) Radical change
d) Consolidation
e) Maintaining

6. Which of the following is not a tool that has been proposed to provide a meaningful integration of financial, stakeholder and other issues that come into evaluating a firm’s performance? [pg 87]

a) Scenario analysis
b) Balanced scorecards
c) Strategy maps
d) Executive dashboards
e) They all focus on integrating issues and evaluating firm performance

7. The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) growth/share matrix is among the best known of the portfolio planning approaches. Which of the quadrants of that matrix involves low industry growth rates, but relatively high market share? [pg 164] a) Cash cows
b) Dogs
c) Blue oceans
d) Stars
e) Question marks

Sample short-answer questions
Q1: Jasminder Choudhury wanted to re-position her cosmetics firm to be more of an innovator than a follower in the market. As part of her planning process, she was keen to understand which of her current resources might enable her firm to attain competitive advantage and was wondering what factors she should be considering as a means of evaluating those resources and their potential to contribute to the sustainability of advantage (2 marks). Moving forward, she knew that her strategy would also depend on her ability to attract, develop and retain human capital and was looking for suggestions about how she might approach these challenges (2 marks). Lastly, Jasminder was looking to you for help in understanding whether or not it was reasonable for her to expect to fully implement and realize upon her intended strategy (1 mark). [9, 78-80, 101-105]

Q2: Bill Smith figured that it was quite simple; if he could achieve the low cost position in the market he would be better able to compete. He was concerned however that there might be some pitfalls associated with an overall cost leadership strategy and wondered what they were (2 marks). He also thought that if he had a low cost structure, he might be able to drop his prices as a means of stimulating volumes. He wasn’t sure about how the competition might respond to this type of competitive action and was wondering if there was some model of competitive dynamics that would help him think through the implications of any new competitive action he might take (3 marks). [128-129, 225-232]