Business Reality
Your students can name the functions. Few can describe how they connect.
A management syllabus teaches sales, marketing, finance, HR and operations as separate subjects, examined separately. No business runs them separately. This session puts practitioners in a room to describe how the parts actually depend on one another, so everything taught afterwards has somewhere to attach.
Departments are a diagram. A business is a chain.
Students learn each function as a chapter, then meet a company where a pricing decision changes what marketing promises, what operations can deliver, and whether finance sees the cash this quarter. The chapters do not prepare them for that.
This is the orientation session — the one that gives a student somewhere to put everything else. It is deliberately broad, and it is the reason the more specific sessions land better afterwards.
What the session covers
22 topics across 4 areas. Six views of the same business.
The Functions, BrieflyWhat each part of a company is actually responsible for.7
Not a lecture on each — a practitioner sketch of what the job involves and what it is measured on.
- Sales
- Marketing
- Finance
- HR
- Operations
- Technology
- Customer success
Depth comes in the individual sessions. This one establishes the map.
How They Depend on One AnotherThe handovers are where businesses succeed or fail.5
- What sales promises that operations has to deliver
- What marketing generates that sales has to work
- What finance controls that everyone else needs
- What HR supplies that every team depends on
- Where the handovers usually break
How a Business Measures ItselfWhat gets watched, and by whom.5
- How businesses measure performance
- What a manager reviews weekly
- What leadership reviews monthly
- Which numbers matter to which function
- How targets cascade down
Where a Management Graduate StartsThe honest version of an entry-level role.5
- How entry-level management roles actually work
- What employers expect from management graduates
- What the first ninety days involve
- What gets delegated to a fresher, and why
- How performance is judged early on
Questions students get to ask
- What does your day actually look like?
- Which decisions are yours to make?
- What does your team get judged on?
- What do management graduates misunderstand about your function?
- What would you have learned earlier?
- How much of your work is meetings?
- Who do you argue with most, and about what?
Who students hear from
- Sales leaders
- Marketing managers
- Finance professionals
- HR leaders
- Operations managers
- Founders
- Consultants
How the session runs
Practitioners from several functions, in the same room rather than on separate days. Each sketches what their function is responsible for and what it is measured on. Then the interesting part: they describe a decision that involved all of them, and disagree in front of the students about how it should have gone. Open questions follow.
What your students leave with
- A working picture of how a company fits together
- An understanding of what each function is responsible for and measured on
- A sense of where the handovers between teams usually break
- Realistic expectations of an entry-level management role
- A frame to attach the rest of their syllabus to
- Better questions to take into every later session
Scheduled sessions
Nothing scheduled yet
Sessions are arranged with a college once a date is agreed. Ask us and we will find the right person for it.
A student rather than a college? See what is coming up, or ask your placement team to host this.
Students can name the functions. This is the session where they see the business.
Tell us who your students are and what stage they are at. Sessions are free for participants.