It's all about "wealth management." Increasing efficiencies, facilitating the economy, that kind of thing. You'd think, for example, that the insurance company for which I work would be primarily concerned about selling insurance. And indeed it does sell insurance, concentrating mostly on smallish policies, since that's its bread and butter. But its executives don't think of insurance as a product that they're selling in the same way that GM sells cars. Rather, an insurance policy is a class of investment, which people use to manage their wealth. The client puts money in, the company invests it, the company profits, and the client gains protection from inflation, and perhaps even makes some gains on interest.
As a businessperson, it could for example be your job to attack pretty much any stage of the operation, to increase the company's profits in whatever way you can think of. This is generally a matter of increasing efficiencies, until you get knowledgeable enough and senior enough to implement profitable policies. You could, e.g., design insurance policies so as to attract more customers, or to manage the company's risks in a more profitable fashion. Or you could research the market and decide what kinds of investment are best for the company to make, or specifically how customers' money should best be handled. Or you could work on figuring out how to maintain and expand the company's niche against competitors for consumers of insurance. Or you could do a human resources type of job, designing office systems, information flow, or communications between different branches of the company's organism. Or you could find ways to improve the company's medical standards for deciding whether to accept applicants, what kind of medical documentation to require from different age groups, how and when to refer cases to reinsurers, etc.
And then of course there's variation within all of those areas: if you're not very talented or bright, then you don't get much room to make business decisions, and instead get a job implementing those decisions. If you are talented and bright, and lucky, then you attain managerial or executive positions, and you can have direct influence on how the company does its business.
I hope this is some help. I only have experience in insurance, and not much at that, but I know it was an eye-opener for me to realise how much of the company's business has little to do with insurance itself.
Been there, done that.
