To be commercially aware, you must often break free from your organisation to consider it in a wider external context – but in this course you will look internally. We encourage you to fully recognise, an insider’s perspective.
Most insider impressions of a business will be heavily influenced by a particular position they hold in it, and the subjective experiences they’ve had within the organisation.
Traders get an insight into this phenomenon from organisations listed on trade exchanges.
Within this course and its treatment of insider value, you will notice where we focus on prices (and costs), the discussions may assume an intimate link between value and money; it will be assumed the recipients of the outputs of organisations always want ‘value for money’. However it is important to note – although this theme will not be developed – that there are alternative assessments of value. The context unraveling here is one of commercial awareness.
The following extract gives a flavour of such an alternative and its importance in commercial environments.
companies are more than instruments for generating money; they are also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them. According to this school of thought, the value that a company creates should be measured not just in terms of short-term profits or paychecks, but also in terms of how it sustains the conditions that allow it to flourish over time.
(Moss Kanter, 2011)
In understanding value and the way it is created through organisations, it is vital to bear in mind that organisations (and to an even greater extent, wider industries and economies) are complex systems where value is added incrementally by various people, activities and procedures. Often their contribution is not easy to see as a simple sequence of events.
Chains of value run through economies, industries and organisations from suppliers to customers, with numerous, often complicated, systems and processes. Organisation insiders play a vital role in expanding commercial awareness especially when it comes to market trading.
