The Center is one of the top rehabilitation hospitals in the entire nation, dedicating themselves to medical treatment, rehabilitation for people with spinal and brain injury as well as continuing their research efforts towards better safety protocols, prevention of spinal injuries and awareness of brain injuries (Shepherd, 2011). The center has remained dedicated throughout the years to helping patients with their tragic injuries and illness to regain their confidence allowing them to reclaim their lives with independence and optimism. In the validating the mission of Shepherd Center the author will use several tools to show how the center has been living up to their mission statement while upholding a social responsibility in the community. This paper will identify the best value discipline, generic strategy, and grand strategy for your organization and recommend a strategy or combination of strategies in which the organization should implement.
Management consultants Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema believe that strategies must center on delivering superior customer value through one of three value disciplines: operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership (Pearce and Robinson, 2009). Customer intimacy entails offerings tailored to meet the demands of identified niches. Whereas product leadership involves offering customers leading-edge products and services that make rivals’ goods obsolete. Over the years Shepherd Center as adopted the product leadership and customer intimacy strategies. Companies that implement a strategy of customer intimacy continually tailor and shape products and services to fit the increasingly refined definition of the customer (Barney, 2007).
The center has created the “Five Pillars of Excellence “which includes the two most important, people and service. Service has continued to be the core pillar within this organization. They are continuously creating new therapy programs for the patients, incorporated the SHARE Initiative which provides rehabilitation and community-based care to U.S. military service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, implemented care procedures for secondary complications for patients who were admitted but has secondary complications that prevents them from effectively continuing with their rehab programs. The Center has made it a part of their mission to provide patients, upon discharge, the continued care that may need by providing them with opportunities in continuing their rehab programs with the center’s day program and outpatient clinics. Post discharge the patients are informed about the bridge program at Shepherd. The program offered clients education, guidance and referral information after a catastrophic injury or illness that allowed discharged clients the opportunity to become better capable to tackle career, psychosocial, medical concerns which could occur during their first year after the illness or injury they endured.
Practicing product leadership and customer intimacy has been working hand in hand for the center. They have created programs that has surpassed them from their rivals and launched them to their current status as the leading spinal injury hospital. Product leadership has been seen in their current researches as they attempt to use such outcomes as innovations to successfully increase awareness to patients, create new products and developing treatments that better suite an injured patient for better results through therapy. A current study is the “Changes in interface pressure in variable position wheelchairs”, this research allows investigators see changes in interface pressures between the client’s body and the cushion of wheelchair as it shifts into other positions. Results from this study will be displayed on a pressure map where clients can see the areas that are consistently being applied the most pressure. With this information clients have the ability to know where their problem areas are located and