The Strategic Alternatives Create the End-Means Chain

The Strategic Alternatives Create the End-Means Chain
Directional strategies are the organization’s mission, values, vision, and strategic goals. Strategic planners use directional strategies to guide the strategy development decision logic. Strategic alternatives, on the other hand, are strategies that provide the fundamental approaches to achieving the vision by showing different pathways to decide on certain decisions. The similarity between the directional strategic and strategic alternatives is that both create “direction” for the healthcare organization. The strategic alternatives create the end-means chain. In this context, functional strategies meet divisional strategies, which consequently perform corporate strategies. Divisional and corporate adaptive strategies offer further direction for the healthcare organization to achieve its goals, values, vision, and mission (directional strategies). The primary difference between the two is that strategic alternatives offer a general action course available to the healthcare organization and are more specific compared to directional strategies (Ginter et al., 2018). The direction is reinforced as managers understand, make decisions, and commit according to the strategy. Directional strategies and strategic alternatives are used to achieve the healthcare organization’s strategic objectives (Watson, 2018).
In this context, directional strategies for a healthcare organization include its goals, values, vision, and mission. While the directional strategies set the broadest direction for the hospital (e.g., attainment of the organization’s overall objective), strategic alternatives open healthcare professionals’ thinking to what could be attained (e.g., patient care outcomes). In a hospital setting, employing directional strategies could reduce accounts receivable days (AR days) while augmenting hospital values, vision, and mission to the patients and healthcare professionals. On the contrary, strategic alternatives can help the hospital establish better solutions for cultural differences that could exist between the leadership and the staff. By implementing this and reducing AR days, nurses find it practical to accomplish their duties without hurdles (Soule & Drabkin, 2015). This supports the vision and mission of delivering increasingly patient-centered and high-quality holistic care centered on a strategic app...