Healthcare strategy and organizational implementation

¶ … components of strategic management. They include internal and external analysis, strategy formulation and strategy implementation (Clayton, 2014). The external analysis allows the company to understand what opportunities and threats exist in the market. The internal analysis allows the company to understand its own capabilities and weaknesses, the latter of which might constrain what options it will be able to pursue. Once these are known the company can then formulate a strategy. This can be to leverage strengths to pursue opportunities or remove threats, or the company can choose to shore up weaknesses as a means of defending against threats. A critical role of management is to make good strategy decisions. Implementation is the next step, and this relies on management understanding the steps to getting the company to execute the strategy it has formulate. Understanding the tactics and changes that need to be made in order to execute the strategy is key to strategy implementation.

2.

An organization's mission and values are important to strategy formulation for a couple of reasons. The first is that they provide a sense of direction for the company. The mission and values in part define what the company wants to be, and what its objectives might be (Kokemuller, 2014). Thus, the formulation should absolutely reflect the type of company that is expressed in the mission statement and the statement of values.

The second reason is that having a mission and values statement is helpful in communicating the strategy and reiterating the strategy throughout the organization. Ultimately, it is difficult to communicate a strategy to a large organization, so the mission and the values end up as a baseline that the company can always refer back to. This means that it is very important for the mission and values to accurately be reflected in the strategy. When formulating strategy, management needs to recognize that it will need to remind employees of the strategy, and the mission statement provides a great way to do that because it is succinct. When the mission and the values are not related in the strategy, there is a certain dissonance within the organization, and the employees are less likely to adopt the strategy and to get behind any new initiatives, because they will not understand as clearly what the company is trying to do, which may cause them to question their own roles.

3.

Strategic management is just as important for a health care organization as it is for any other organization. Many times, health care organization have objectives that are not related to profit, but that is okay, because they still have missions and values, and arguably those are more important to a health care organization than to a regular company.

Strategic management is a tool by which the company seeks to define its objectives and then set a pathway for getting there. Thus, health care organizations use strategic management to identify their stakeholders and then ensure that they are meeting the needs of the stakeholders. The value of strategic management is that it helps allocate scarce resources to achieve a set of objectives, and it does so in manner that is both clear and can be communicated (Devitt, Klassen & Martalog, 2005).

4.

The manner in which strategic management works its magic is simple. When the organization has a strategy, it then has a focal point and its resources can be applied to this strategy. The resources are therefore organized more efficiently and effectively because there is a clear sense of what the organization wants to accomplish. Decisions are easier to make because there is a clear strategy that can help to guide the decisions. When you know what your objective is, it is easier to make decisions that will help you get there, and every decision that you make will bring your organization closer to its objective, which should have been framed in the mission statement.

Financial performance is affected to the extent that it is part of the organization's mission and strategy. For a non-profit, it might be more like breaking even is important, but a for-profit organization is oriented towards enhancing shareholder wealth. To the extent that financial performance is a priority, strategy will reflect that, and therefore organization decision-making will also reflect that priority.