Q&A Hero

Q: Product champions are critical during the period after a new venture project has been defined but before it has gained momentum and achieved project impetus.

Q: According to the text, new venture ideas must pass through two critical stages to be implemented by corporations: project definition and project impetus.

Q: Product champions are the employees who identify new product ideas or services.

Q: Dispersed approaches to corporate entrepreneurship are often found in organizations with a strong spirit of entrepreneurship.

Q: Corporate business incubators often provide physical space and business services to internal ventures, but not funding.

Q: Business incubators are designed to support fledgling entrepreneurial ventures until they can operate as stand-alone businesses.

Q: Firms using a focused approach to corporate entrepreneurship typically separate corporate venturing activities from ongoing operations of the firm.

Q: Corporate venturing that is focused permeates all parts of the organization and involves every member of the organization.

Q: Corporate entrepreneurship is sometimes called intrapreneurship.

Q: Strategic renewal and the pursuit of new venture opportunities are the two primary aims of corporate entrepreneurship.

Q: APC (formerly known as the American Productivity and Quality Center) recognizes companies for exemplary practices that increase entrepreneurship as was demonstrated by awardee Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. who was recognized for the importance of staffing for achieving success.

Q: Crowdsourcing technologies, such as used by IBM when it hosted an Innovation Jam, do not foster collaboration between employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders in their efforts to enhance innovation.

Q: Collaborating with innovation partners can provide missing resources necessary to make innovation projects successful, such as the Coca-Cola and DEKA partnership to produce the Slingshot water purification system.

Q: Innovation efforts of the firm rarely benefit from partnering with non-business entities such as universities and government agencies.

Q: For innovation team members to work enthusiastically on innovation projects, it is important to separate the performance of individual team members from the performance of the innovation itself.

Q: Radical innovation often involves open-ended experimentation which can be very time consuming.

Q: The term strategic envelope refers to the scope of innovation efforts of a firm.

Q: Research indicates that leaders of innovative firms spend fifty percent more time on discovery activities than the leaders of less innovative firms.

Q: Proctor and Gamble is centralizing twenty to thirty percent of its research efforts in a new corporate-level business creation and innovation unit. They believe that this will assist them only with developing incremental innovations that will help the overall bottom line.

Q: Aereo enters the broadcasting market with a new offer that streams the local broadcast signals to customers so that they can watch content on their PCs or tablet computers in real time or save for another viewing time. This is an example of disruptive innovation.

Q: Disruptive innovations are those that overturn markets by providing an altogether new approach to meeting customer needs.

Q: Radical innovations are evolutionary applications of novel ideas within existing paradigms.

Q: As an industry matures, there are greater opportunities for change and so innovations tend to be more radical.

Q: Product innovations are commonly associated with a differentiation strategy.

Q: Process innovations are often associated with a low cost leadership strategy.

Q: The Dutch Boy twist and pour paint container is an example of a high tech source of innovation.

Q: The term innovation refers primarily to an invention that uses the latest technologies.

Q: An effective way to instill ethical behavior in an organization is to distribute rewards strictly on the basis of outcomes.

Q: Many of the scandals on Wall Street might have been eliminated if corporate codes of conduct had outlined more clearly the consequences of unethical behavior.

Q: Codes of conduct have no role in attracting individuals who might want to work for a business that embraces high standards.

Q: Codes of conduct help employees from diverse backgrounds to work more effectively across cultural backgrounds.

Q: Corporate codes of conduct provide norms and expectations for employees to not commit unethical acts.

Q: The example of Dennis Bakke, CEO of AES, in which he and his team took responsibility for employees who lied to the EPA about water quality at the plant, suggests that for an ethical organization, it is not necessary to do more than just take strong punitive action against those who act contrary to the company-established expected behavior.

Q: If leaders do not believe in the ethical standards that they are trying to inspire, they will not be effective as good role models.

Q: In the integrity-based approach to ethics management, behavioral assumptions include that social beings are guided by material self-interest, values, ideals, and peers.

Q: Methods used for ethics management in a compliance-based approach include education, reduced discretion, auditing and controls, and penalties.

Q: In a compliance-based approach to ethics management, the objective is to enable responsible conduct.

Q: In an integrity-based approach to ethics management, ethos is concerned with conformity with externally imposed standards.

Q: In integrity-based ethics programs, organizational ethics is seen as the responsibility of the employees.

Q: There can be a high-integrity organization, without high-integrity individuals.

Q: A compliance-based approach to ethics management combines a concern for law with an emphasis on managerial responsibility for ethical behavior.

Q: There are many advantages of an ethical organization, but it generally has little to do with employee commitment and motivation to excel.

Q: Ethical crises are bad for organization reputation, but they rarely have any financial consequences.

Q: Ethics is a question of personal scruples, a confidential matter between employees and their consciences and therefore for a leader it is acceptable to assume the company should not bear any responsibility for individual misdeeds.

Q: Leaders who fail to institute proper systems and controls that facilitate ethical conduct share responsibility with those who conceive, execute, and knowingly benefit from corporate misdeeds.

Q: Although many organizations encourage creativity and risk taking, few successful companies tolerate failure.

Q: Establishing a culture of dissent can be an effective means of questioning the status quo.

Q: Competitive benchmarking is a method of seeking the best examples of practices or processes that have essentially the same function regardless of industry.

Q: In order to gather information from informal sources, successful executives must be good listeners.

Q: Internal benchmarking is discouraged in most organizations, because it creates competition and internal rivalries that are counterproductive.

Q: To successfully empower employees to achieve organizational goals, leaders must perform the tasks of resource allocation and power brokering.

Q: Inspiring and motivating people with a mission or purpose is a necessary and sufficient condition for developing a learning organization.

Q: A key function of the leaders in a learning organization is to generate an organization-wide commitment to the status quo.

Q: Successful learning organizations have a proactive, creative approach to the unknown.

Q: Organizational learning works best when an organization leader gathers information and teaches it to employees who are like their students.

Q: Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances as well as a knack for finding common ground and building support. This means that they are less likely to be effective in leading change or in having expertise in building and leading teams.

Q: Self-regulated people are unable to create an environment of trust and fairness, where political behavior and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity tends to be high.

Q: People with strong self-awareness are overly critical and unrealistically optimistic and are well suited to run organizations, because they will make good judgment calls.

Q: Empathy, one of the components of emotional intelligence (EI), refers to personal proficiency in managing relationships and building networks.

Q: Emotional intelligence (EI) is generally a better predictor of life success than intelligence quotient (IQ).

Q: Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the components of a high intelligence quotient (IQ).

Q: When Peter Loscher took over as CEO at Siemens in 2007, he lacked internal connections. He used formal bases of power to bring about organizational change and increase a customer orientation.

Q: Coercive power is the power exercised by use of fear of punishment for errors of either omission or commission by employees.

Q: Referent power refers to manager identification with his or her employees.

Q: The two broad bases of leader power are organizational and hierarchical.

Q: Leaders must draw on a range of personal skills as well as organizational mechanisms to move their organizations forward in the face of barriers to change.

Q: Political barriers to change can be overcome by promoting collaboration throughout the organization, as seen in the case study on Natura Cosmeticos of Brazil in which CEO Carlucci implemented a comprehensive engagement process across the organization.

Q: According to the Gresham law of planning, operational decisions do not drive out the time necessary for strategic thinking and reflection.

Q: Behavioral barriers to change occur because of conflicts between departments, conflicts arising from power relationships, and refusal to share information.

Q: Systemic barriers to change refer to elements of organization design, structure, and reporting relationships that impede the flow of information.

Q: The tendency of many individuals to throw good money at bad decisions despite negative performance feedback is referred to as escalation.

Q: Visionary leadership is only the domain of the CEO, as suggested by the example of Joe Ling at 3M who developed the Pollution Prevention Pays (3P) program.

Q: Leaders are not expected to accept personal responsibility for ethical behavior in an organization, because ethics is a matter of individual choice.

Q: Leaders play an important role in sustaining organization culture, but they are powerless to change it.

Q: Designing the organization is the leadership activity that involves building structures, teams, systems, and processes that facilitate the implementation of leader vision.

Q: Setting a direction is the leadership activity that involves developing a strategic vision of what the organization could become.

Q: Three key interdependent strategic leadership activities are: designing the organization; determining its direction; and nurturing a culture dedicated to excellence and ethical behavior.

Q: Discuss the potential benefits of using company policies and procedures to encourage ethical behavior.

Q: Briefly discuss how organization reward and evaluation systems can be used to promote organizational ethics.

Q: What is a corporate credo? How can it be helpful in shaping the moral dimensions of an organization?