I went to Jean and asked the same questions.Her vision was to have each guest be completely pleased with the cleanliness of the room and to have the room in perfect shape when guests arrived. I asked how she felt about Maintenance. She said that Marty really didn’t care about her or Housekeeping: from his perspective, they were there  to fix things and she was there to clean up after them. “That really annoys me,” she said, “because we are not here to clean up after Maintenance.We’re here to ensure the comfort of our guests and make sure their rooms are cleaned. The engineers are supposed to clean up after themselves—and they’ve been told that a hundred times. They just don’t care. And they know if they leave a mess, it reflects on Housekeeping, not them.” I then asked her about the scheduling of the rooms for cleaning and the housekeepers.

She provided me with all the details of the tasks.  After my discussions with Marty and Jean, I began to understand that they really had more in common than they thought. So I invited them both back to a meeting. At the meeting I showed and explained to them the Partnership Continuum model and asked if they were interested in working through the model together. They both agreed. So I asked each of them to share their personal vision with the other. After they did so, I asked them to come up with a shared vision they could both agree on. Since they had so much in common, it was easy for them to do. The shared vision they agreed on was this: Each guest would have a clean room in which everything worked properly.

Understanding where risks lie and what needs to be done to reduce risk is an important part of the process of financial decision-making. For example, you need to know not only where the break-even point is, but also how and when it will be reached.

Reducing business risks

Reducing the risk inherent in business decisions is rarely a linear process. Instead, it is best achieved by applying principles and techniques appropriate to the specific situation and risk. Several of these techniques are outlined below.

Do not ignore or underestimate the wider impact of a financial decision on other parts of the business. Avoid weak budgetary control Budgets are often used merely to assess performance, whereas their real value is as an active tool to inform financial decisions. Budgets should not be cut without giving sufficient thought to how this will affect other
decisions.

Understand the impact of cash flow

Issues of cash flow and the time value of money are often ignored by non-financial managers, to the detriment of the organisation. In the worst case, this may result in the business becoming insolvent.