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Put more simply, and from the perspective students must have for their future: Businesses want to hire bright people, trainable people, who can ultimately make decisions that are best for the business. They don't want employees who cannot grasp the big picture or who cling to a belief that what looks best for marketing or finance is obviously the best decision for the entire business. The present and future manager must have functional expertise with an enterprise perspective. If a student imagines herself as a marketing brand manager for a consumer products firm, a president of a bank, or a consultant, and assumes she will be working with people whose expertise and background are the same as hers, she should think again. She is placing constraints on her career potential. She'll work with systems experts. She'll work with engineers. She'll work with people whose expertise lies in areas that haven't even been thought of yet. She needs to understand what they do and why they do it. She needs to understand how her business converts resources and capabilities into a healthy profit. She needs to understand operations management. Good managers are effective at solving problems in complex systems. They must understand cause and effect. A physician's role is an appropriate analogy. A physician who specializes in a particular aspect of human health, whether it be an endocrinologist, an orthopedist, a dermatologist, or a gastroenterologist has to have an understanding of the entire body. If she doesn't, she won't be able to identify symptoms elsewhere that point to problems within her own area of specialty or the potential problems that can result from problems within her area of focus. She can't make the best decision for the endocrine system, the best decision for the skeletal system, the best decision for the skin, or the best decision for the gastric system. She has to make the best decision for the person. Business functions do not act independently. The overlapping rectangles in Exhibit 1.1 illustrate how information sharing and decision making involve many functions and personnel with diverse expertise. A business is a system. No functional department can make a decision that doesn't affect the rest of the firm. The important decisions of the firm—those that have critical implications for its success—occur at the interface. The decision makers recognize the implications because they understand the business.
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