BROKEN HANDOFFS: The Financial and Ethical Cost of Commercial Disconnection

Companies do not lose money because of bad employees; they lose it because good people are forced to make decisions in the dark. When Sales promises unverified inventory, Marketing launches uncommunicated campaigns, and Finance uncovers margin damage retroactively, executives typically misdiagnose these as "communication problems." In Broken Handoffs, Rolf Obermaier exposes these issues for what they truly are: structural design failures. This practitioner-written guide provides a comprehensive roadmap to permanently repair the three most costly organizational fractures: Sales vs. Purchasing, Marketing vs. Purchasing, and Sales vs. Marketing. Core Themes & Deliverables: The Financial Case: Quantifies the exact cost of misalignment, offering a worked cost calculation across lost gross margin, emergency freight, wasted campaign spend, discount leakage, and customer-loss risk. The Ethical Argument: Highlights the injustice of holding employees accountable for outcomes they cannot control, promising customers the impossible, and misleading vendors with unvalidated commitments. 17 Practical Tools: Equips leaders with actionable assets like the Availability Matrix, Supply-Cleared Promotional Calendar, Friction Report, and Shared Commercial Scorecard. Strategic Implementation: Provides a structured 30/90/180-day roadmap that anticipates and neutralizes internal resistance points. The Role of AI: Demonstrates how artificial intelligence can make integration mechanically sustainable by eliminating the friction of chasing siloed information, rather than replacing human judgment. Broken Handoffs is designed for commercial leaders ready to move beyond chronic misdiagnoses and build a connected organization where every department operates with complete, illuminated access to the information they need.