Sales Owned the Result. No One Owned the Whole.

Beyond the four days — cases for the book · Organizational coherence — when formal authority is not enough to govern the whole

The table

Irena GrofelnikCEO & Owner · SPIRITON Ltd. Co

the people at the table are to be named by the owner

The case

Subtitle: When Formal Authority Is Not Enough to Govern the Whole Art of Leadership · Organizational Coherence · anonymized real case

At the end of a business-process review, the CEO heard two competing explanations for the same commercial problem.

The process consultant's diagnosis was direct: the problem did not sit in sales alone. It ran through procurement, logistics, inventory and sales. The owner's response was equally direct: sales did not want to take responsibility.

The disagreement mattered because the company — a €14 million distributor of personal protective equipment with eight locations and several commercial channels — was already under pressure. Margins were falling. Around €2 million of inventory had been sitting in stock for three to five years. Competitors were entering customer conversations with prices approximately 20% lower.

Management expected sales to increase revenue, protect margin and move stock. The visible diagnosis was simple: sales had to perform better. The deeper the end-to-end commercial process was mapped, however, the less the problem looked like a sales problem.

Procurement was continuing to order products that were no longer moving well. Supplier conditions were rarely challenged with the intensity the market required, even when competitor quotations showed prices approximately 20% lower. Product ranges were not being refreshed consistently enough, and some older items continued to enter the system.

At the same time, logistics and the warehouse did not systematically surface slow-moving or ageing inventory to the commercial teams. Sales did not receive a regular, actionable view of which products had already been sitting for three, four or even five years, which quantities were becoming problematic, or which final pieces needed to be moved before they lost further relevance.

Sales was being asked to clear inventory without having a reliable picture of what needed to be cleared.

When old stock did become visible, another contradiction appeared. Sales proposed promotions to move it. One of the owners resisted because discounting would reduce the recorded margin on those products — even though roughly €2 million of stock had already been ageing for three to five years.

The company was protecting the margin percentage of inventory that was steadily losing its ability to create economic value.

The tension was not only operational. One of the owners was also the director of procurement. She was also the CEO's wife. Procurement therefore sat in a different power position from the other functions. Its decisions shaped purchase price, assortment and supplier conditions, yet the commercial result was still treated primarily as the responsibility of sales.

The process review made the asymmetry visible: procurement influenced what entered the system; logistics controlled the visibility and movement of stock; sales faced the customer and carried the pressure for revenue and margin. The three functions were interdependent, but they were not jointly accountable for the same economic outcome.

The diagnosis challenged the prevailing allocation of responsibility: sales was accountable for commercial performance, while procurement and logistics shaped critical conditions of that performance.

For management, however, that diagnosis sounded like deflection.

Procurement was defended. The system diagnosis was rejected as a sales excuse.

For a period, the company nevertheless tested a different way of working. Logistics was asked to prepare a list of products that had remained in stock for extended periods. Procurement was asked to reopen supplier discussions when sales could show competitor quotations with prices around 20% lower, particularly for larger volumes and new customers. The objective was to stop asking sales to absorb every market gap through lower margin and harder selling.

The functions began to connect. Information started to move. Supplier conditions were challenged more directly. The company started to address ageing inventory instead of treating it as someone else's problem.

But the change depended on an internal champion with enough credibility and influence to keep the new behaviour alive.

Then the champion left the company.

The organization gradually returned to its old patterns.

The processes had been mapped. The problem had been named. Alternative practices had been tested. Yet the new way of working had never become strong enough to survive the departure of the person sponsoring it.

If cross-functional cooperation disappears when one influential person leaves, was the organization ever coherent — or merely temporarily coordinated?

The decision

The CEO now had to decide whether the problem was primarily one of process — or one of power and governance. Formally, he had the authority to change the procurement leadership role. Informally, that authority was constrained: the director of procurement was both an owner and his wife.

The company could keep the existing ownership and management structure and demand stronger sales execution. It could preserve the owner as head of procurement but introduce common commercial metrics, formal inventory governance and shared accountability across procurement, logistics and sales. Or the CEO could use his formal authority to separate ownership from operational procurement leadership, appoint a professional head of procurement and make all three functions accountable to the economics of the whole commercial system.

None of the options was cost-free. Keeping the structure protected continuity and family equilibrium, but risked preserving the same asymmetry. Shared metrics could improve coordination, but only if every function — including an owner-led one — could genuinely be challenged. Removing the owner from the operational role could professionalize procurement, but it would turn an organizational decision into a family and ownership decision as well.

The CEO's question was no longer how to make sales work harder. Sales owned the result, but no one owned the whole. He formally had the authority to change the system, yet exercising that authority meant challenging a critical function led by his wife and co-owner. The leadership question was whether the organization could optimize the whole while one part of the system operated under a different power logic from the rest.

Can an organization become accountable for the performance of the whole when one part of the system is protected by ownership power?

Alternatives under consideration

Discussion Questions

1. Where should accountability for commercial performance begin and end: with sales, or across the full chain from procurement to inventory to customer?
2. When does protecting gross margin on an item become economically irrational when approximately €2 million of inventory has been ageing for three to five years?
3. Can shared KPIs and process rules create real accountability when one function has structurally greater power than the others?
4. Was the central failure in this case primarily one of people, process, incentives, governance or organizational design?
5. What does the return to old behaviour after the champion left reveal about the difference between temporary coordination and an organizational capability?
6. Would removing the owner from the procurement leadership role solve the system problem — or simply turn an organizational problem into a family-governance conflict?

Two unresolved questions for the table:

1. Can organizational coherence exist when responsibility is shared but the authority to challenge decisions is not?
2. What should a CEO do when formal responsibility for the whole exceeds the practical authority to challenge a function led by a spouse and co-owner?

Case lens: Organizational Coherence™

This case examines whether an organization can consistently make decisions in the interest of the whole when information, authority and accountability are distributed asymmetrically across functions.

The case does not assume that ownership and management are inherently incompatible. It tests a narrower leadership question: what happens when ownership and family relationships make one operating function less challengeable than the functions that depend on it?

Your comment on this chapter

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