BUS501 Real-World Connections: Episode 2, Who Decides at Which Level

About 2 minutes. Captions are available with the CC button. Open on YouTube.

Transcript

Narrator: Real-World Connections. Episode 2: Who Decides at Which Level

Narrator: The supermarket contract is still wobbling, and Adaeze has called her team to Toronto.

Narrator: Today's question sounds simple. Who decides what?

Adaeze: Tomás, I hear you've already offered Marisol a price cut.

Tomás: To save the contract. That's my call, isn't it? Wholesale is my division.

Priya: Part of it is. But a price cut is a tactic. It should serve a strategy, and the strategy should serve an objective.

Daniel: Sounds like head-office talk.

Priya: Think of it as layers. At the top, vision and mission for the whole company. Then corporate strategy, the cafés and wholesale together. Then each business unit gets its own strategy. Then functions like marketing and production.

Hana: And people. Hiring and training plans live at that functional level too.

Priya: Right. And every layer has to be logically consistent, all the way down to the metrics.

Adaeze: So if I want wholesale to grow profitably, and Tomás cuts price to keep volume...

Tomás: I might hit my volume target and miss your margin target.

Daniel: And my plant runs flat out for less money.

Adaeze: So I just set the objectives top-down?

Priya: You could. Or build up from the divisions, bottom-up. A lot of teams go both ways. That's bidirectional.

Hana: Kofi knows things about customers we'll never see from this room.

Adaeze: Fine. Each of you brings me one objective. Realistic, measurable, with a date on it. Tomás, hold off on Marisol for a week.

Tomás: One week.

Narrator: Hearth & Harbor has two businesses, one plant, fourteen cafés, and plenty of people who'd like to make the call.

Narrator: Using the hierarchy of strategies, which supermarket contract decisions belong at the corporate level, which belong to the wholesale division, and which belong to functions like production?

Pause and apply

Sketch a hierarchy of strategies for Hearth & Harbor, with corporate, business unit, and functional levels. Put one realistic, measurable objective with a deadline at each level, then explain how Tomás's price cut would fit or clash with each one.

License: CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication), except the Lucide icons (ISC License) and the background music (Motivating Mornings, Mixkit (Mixkit Stock Music Free License)), which aren't covered. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/