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.

Five minutes and the fifth function in your business. I've been talking about the purpose of each of the five business functions and what it looks like when a function misses its telos.

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.

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. 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.

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

the business starts to unravel.

So what does it look like when 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? Strategy misses the mark when it focuses on making profit instead of creating value.

Sales misses it when it focuses on generating revenue instead of promoting value. Operations misses it

when it focuses on exploiting efficiency instead of delivering value.

Administration misses it when it focuses on controlling the business instead of managing the value.

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