Hello and welcome to Business 300. My name is Philip Kulenshov and this is 300

seconds about business. We're all a busy people, so I have five minutes or less to get my point across.

There are five minutes in this episode.

And there are five basic functions in any business.

Strategy, sales, operations, administration, and finance.

All five revolve around delivering value to a customer.

Strategy creates the value, sales promotes it, operations delivers it, administration manages it, and finance reports on it.

Each function exists for the sake of the value provided for the customer,

even some of the functions that seem like they're more internally focused.

Yes, even those functions exist for the customer.

It's when we lose that focus

and start to act as if a function exists for the business, or worse, for itself, that that function

begins to drag the business down. This can happen with any of the functions. Existing in a silo is no good.

A man who isolates himself seeks his own, proverb says. So it is with the business

department. When the entire business or an individual department tries to exist for its own sake,

the business starts to unravel. The point of the business is to serve the customer. It exists for

the customer. A business needs a customer in order to even be considered a business. The entire

focus and approach is to be one that's looking out. So what does it look like when the business

departments lose that outward focus and instead start trying to serve themselves? What does it look

like for a business to exist for its own sake? Let's first look at the upstream function of

strategy. Maybe you call this something

different, business development, upstream marketing, innovation and investment, whatever you call it,

...