After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1. List and briefly discuss the primary ways that business organizations compete.
2. List five reasons for the poor competitiveness of some companies.
3. Define the term strategy and explain why strategy is important for competitiveness.
4. Contrast strategy and tactics.
5. Discuss and compare organization strategy and operations strategy, and explain why it is important to link the two.
6. Describe and give examples of time-based strategies.
7. Define the term productivity and explain why it is important to organizations and to countries.
8. List some of the reasons for poor productivity and some ways of improving it.