ROLL NO_______________

IIPM
PGP/FALL & FALL WINTER/2012-14
THIRD SEMESTER END TERM EXAMINATION 2013
Subject: Business Policy
Maximum Marks: 75

Time: 3 Hrs

INSTRUCTIONS:

You have to attempt the questions as per the instructions for this paper.

Carefully note the marks for each question.

Begin answer to a new question on a new page.

Write legibly and keep the length of the answer as per the weightage (in terms of marks)
assigned to each question. DONOT be unduly short or long in providing the relevant details.

The question number of the answer to the question you are attempting must match with
the corresponding question number in the question paper.
NOTE:

You have to answer question 1 (case study) and 2 are compulsory . Plus answer 3 more questions
from Q3-Q8. In all you have answer (1+1+3) = 5 questions. All questions carry equal marks
(15*5= 75)

Q1 Case study
THE STORY OF LIEUTENANT SIMS
Innovating is an exciting, invigorating experience. However, one must be aware of the
circumstances facing an innovator in a typical organization, and understand how to get ones
innovation accepted and implemented. The story of Lieutenant Sims, a well-known example of
innovation described by historian Elting Morison in his book Men, Machines and Modern Timesi
, provides an interesting illustration of what an enthusiastic innovator can expect to encounter.
Lt. William Sims was a young officer in the United States Navy, posted in the South China Sea at
the end of the nineteenth century. At the time, the U.S. Navy was riding high. It had just played
a critical role in winning the Spanish American War, and was seen as the best navy in the world.
Interestingly, this success was despite a critical problem with one of its main tasks gunning
down enemy ships. Clearly, gunfire at sea is difficult. Hitting a target using a gun fixed on the
deck of a ship that is rolling and being tossed around by waves, is extremely difficult. A gun
pointer had to estimate the distance to the target, raise the gun barrel to suit the range by using
elevating gears, look through simple sights and then fire at the exact time the roll of the ship
brought the sights in line with the target. Adding telescopic sights did not improve accuracy
much either. Naval gunnery was essentially an art developed over many years of practice, with
wide variation across gunners and overall low hit rates. In fact, a study conducted by the Bureau
of Ordnance found that only around 1.3 percent of shots fired hit their mark. However, the U.S.
Navy did not see this low hit rate as problematic. In comparison with other navies, the U.S.
Navy was doing very well and the relative inaccuracy of gunfire at sea was accepted as a fact of
life in naval warfare.

All that changed in 1898, with the introduction of continuous-aim gunfire, a technique that
enabled the gun pointer to keep the sights of the gun on the target throughout the roll of a ship.
This was done through changes in the gear ratio that enabled the gunner to adapt to the roll of the
ship by moving the gun up or down rapidly. With the sights now being integral to the process,
gunners also found better use for telescopic sights, further improving accuracy. Overall, the
changes to the aiming process, facilitated by the technological changes in the gears and sights,
produced a 3000 percent increase in accuracy over six years, by one account.
The person credited with the idea of continuous-aim gunfire is Admiral Sir Percy Scott of the
British Navy, who came up with the innovation around 1898 while he was captain of H.M.S.
Scylla. Scott was by nature an inventor, and had long sought to improve the accuracy of naval
gunfire. He spent a good deal of time watching the gunners on his ship in action, seeking to
identify improvements. One day while his ship was at target practice in rough seas, he was on the
deck watching several gunners try to hit targets. The violent pitching and rolling of the ship
meant that the gunners efforts were largely futile; that is for all but one man. Scott noticed that
this gunner was unconsciously moving his elevating gears back and forth rapidly to compensate
for the roll of the ship, and was having better success than his peers. Scott instantly realized what
this meant. If he could somehow enable all his gunners to continuously adapt the elevation of
their guns so that their sights were trained on the target throughout the roll of a ship, he could
dramatically improve their accuracy. He accomplished this through changes in the gear ratio and
some modifications to the telescopic sights. As he expected, the accuracy of the gunners on the
H.M.S. Scylla went up dramatically. While Scott had not invented any of the components
involved, he had brought together existing components in a combination that made continuousaim gunfire possible.In 1900, Scott was stationed on H.M.S. Terrible in the South China Sea.
While there, he refined his continuous-aim gunfire techniques on that ship. Also while there he
met Lt. Sims, a man who shared his dissatisfaction with the state of naval gunnery, and in whom
he found a ready audience for his new gunfire technique. Lt. Sims was instantly interested in
Scotts idea and learned the details of the continuous-aim gunfire technique from him. He also
modified the guns on his own ship, and found dramatic improvements in accuracy. Delighted
with the results, he set out to share his findings with the U.S. Navy, with the goal of changing
gunnery in the U.S. Navy.
He created detailed reports containing data from his own trials and those conducted by Scott,
lists of procedures, documentation and engineering drawings of changes to the mechanical
components involved, training requirements, etc., and sent them to the Bureau of Ordnance and
the Bureau of Navigation. He expected an enthusiastic response to the innovation he was
describing. To his surprise, he heard nothing. The bureaus simply filed away this reports; later he
found out that some of them had been eaten away by insects in the file drawers. Sims was irate at
the response to his idea, and decided to alter his approach. He produced additional reports, and
this time changed his tone to be more strident and forceful. He also circulated his reports widely
to other officers. Sure that he could now not be ignored, he waited for a response.
When it came, it was not what he had hoped for. The Bureau of Ordnance informed him that they
were in receipt of his reports and had conducted trials to test his idea. In the trials they had found
that five men acting on the elevating gear of a typical gun could not move it enough to
compensate for a roll of five degrees in ten seconds, thus proving that continuous-aim gunfire
was not possible. They also informed him that the equipment used by the U.S. Navy was at least
as good as that used by the British Navy, and so if there was an accuracy problem it was caused
by poor training of the gunners, which was the responsibility of naval officers on the ships. The
experiments they spoke of in their response to Sims were conducted in the Washington Navy
Yard, on solid ground, which did not take into account the rolling of the ship that helped a
gunner in elevating and lowering a gun with relatively little effort. Sims was aghast at the
approach taken by the Bureau of Ordnance. At this point, the veneer of civility in the interaction

was dropped and there was a prolonged period of arguments and name-calling between Sims and
the Bureau of Ordnance, who increasingly treated Sims as a delusional egomaniac and accused
him of falsifying data. They hoped that the problem would go away, and were comforted that
Sims was a junior lieutenant 8000 miles away in the South China Sea. Sims for his part kept
sending more reports, but increasingly felt that the administratorsin Washington were being lazy,
incompetent obstructionists who refused to see reason. He decided that unusual steps would be
needed to overcome their resistance. Therefore, he collected all hisdocumentation and sent it
directly to Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the U.S. He implored him to consider the data
from his own ship and Scotts, and informed him of his inability to get the Department of the
Navy to pay attention to the innovation. President Roosevelt, formerly an Assistant Secretary of
the Navy, who tended to respond to such appeals when he could, was intrigued by the idea and
immediately saw potential in it. He ordered Sims to Washington in 1902, where Lt. Sims was
made the U.S. Navys Inspector of Target Practice, a post he held for six years. During that
period he instituted continuous-aim gunfire as the standard practice for gunners in the
U.S. Navy, thus dramatically improving the accuracy of gunfire in the U.S. Navy.
a) What is the central theme of the case ?
b) Identify the stakeholders in this case and discuss in brief their roles.
Q2) Define/ Concepts
(a) Vision
(b) VRIS framework.
(c) PESTLE
(d) Mckinsey 7s framework
(e) BCG Matrix
(f) Resources and capabilities.
(g) SBUSS (Strategic business units)
(h) Porters 5 force models.
(i) Value chain
(j) Entry and exit barrier.
(k) Objectives
(l) Cost leadership.
(m) Stability strategies.
(n) Horizontal integration
(0) SMART.
Q3) Define strategy and illustrate the major elements of strategy?
Q4) Discuss the approaches of environmental scanning?
Q5) Define diversification and discuss reasons for adopting a diversification. Elaborate on the
different types of diversification?
Q6) Discuss the 3 types of diversification with examples?
Q7) Discuss Porters generic strategy with examples?
Q8) Explain the concept of competitive advantage with examples. What do you mean by casual
ambiguity?