Final state examination questions
Business Management – common section
1. Value Chain or Value Ladder Analysis: Explain the concept of value chain or value
ladder analysis and elaborate on how it can be used in the evaluation of existing firms
and during the creation of new enterprises.
2. Process Mapping and Proforma Financial Statements: How is end-to-end business
process mapping related to proforma financial statements when analysing the future
direction of an enterprise?
3. Holistic View of the Firm: What is meant by taking a holistic view of the firm and how
does it allow for better business planning?
4. Creating a Business: When establishing a new enterprise, what are the main activities
undertaken, what are the main focus areas of these activities, and how best are the
results documented and communicated to stakeholders?
5. Impact of Cultures on Strategic Management: Explain the impact that national,
corporate, and professional cultures may have on the development of corporate
strategy. Comment on corporate culture’s role in determining an organisations
strategic direction.
6. Plans and Planning Horizons: Discuss the concept of planning horizons and give a
concrete example of downward cascading starting with strategic intent and ending
with daily operational outputs.
7. Avoiding Strategic Drift: What is strategic drift? Provide a description of a structured
strategic management process by which organisations can avoid the consequences of
strategic drift.
8. Change management: Why do companies need to change? What are the differences
between gradual and big bang changes? Where does the resistance to changes come
from and how can one support adoption of changes?
9. Organizational culture: What are the elements of organizational culture and how are
they linked? What are the sources of organizational culture? Why is it difficult to
change organizational culture? What types of organizational cultures can you define?
10. Stakeholder management: Why did the shareholder approach precede the
stakeholder approach? Why was the stakeholder theory formulated? What are the
stakeholder attributes and what is their role in stakeholder analysis?
11. Corporate governance: What are the basic corporate governance models and what
are their main differences? How are they influenced by the typical macro environment
characteristics? What are the consequences of ownership and management
separation? How do agency and stewardship theory differ in their assumptions and
recommendations?
12. International Management: Explain the key concepts (MNE, internationalisation,
global integration). Describe the challenges of the international environment and
current issues influencing the international management practice. Explain the
proactive and reactive reasons for going international.
13. International Strategy: Describe and explain the strategy formulation process in
MNE, compare the globalisation/regionalisation approaches and its consequences for
MNE. Discuss various entry strategic alternatives, its advantages/disadvantages and
possible risks.
14. Organizational Structure in Multinational Company: Discuss the reasons for
organisational change. Explain the Stopford and Wells structural stages model.
Compare and contrast organisational strategies (Bartlett and Ghoshall model) using
the three organisational characteristics suggested by the model.
15. Global Alliances: Describe the reasons for entering into strategic alliances and its
types (scale alliance, access alliance, collusive alliance, complementary alliance).
Discuss the challenges in implementing global alliances and suggest how to solve them
(guidelines for successful alliances). Explain the reasons for entering M&As. Describe
the acquisition phases. Explain why M&As sometimes fail to produce anticipated
results.
16. Project Management: Define a project. What is the iron triangle? Describe the
rationale of Critical Path Method; discuss its advantages and disadvantages. What is
the rationale of risk analysis and management; what tools and techniques can be
used? What is the rationale of progress tracking?
17. Human resources management in the context: Role of HR in organisations. Past and
present of HRM. Strategic HRM. Strategy and policy of HRM in a company.
Contemporary trends in HRM. Organisational culture. Relationship between
organisational culture and company performance.
18. Staffing and human resource planning: Labour market and external factors. HR
planning. Job design. Recruitment process. Methods of recruitment and selection
process. New approaches for effective staff selection. Orientation and adaptation of a
new employee. Establishing effective team work. Releasing people from the
organization. Job loss and outplacement programs in companies.
19. Human resources development: Learning and development of HR. Competency
approach in HRM, competency models. Knowledge management and learning
organizations. Career planning. Talent management processes. Organizational
development, change management and transformation process.
20. Employee performance management: Motivation and influencing of human
behaviour. The process of performance management. Job Evaluation and pay systems.
Methods of employee evaluation. Systems of financial and non-financial appraisal.
21. Organizations and Information Systems: Describe rationale of systems approach,
contrast open and closed systems. Define information systems. What are major types
of IS in organizations and their relationships? What impact IS have on organizations?
22. Production management: Contrast the logic of push and pull systems. Describe
different systems (just in time, kanban, lean production, material requirements
planning)
23. Business process management: Define process and other key terms. Describe
rationale of business process improvement and reengineering. Define rationale of
process maps. Contrast process and functional view on a company.
24. Models and simulation: describe the concept of a model. What are main reasons to
use simulations? What are major phases of a simulation study?