Help Understanding Different Roles in Corporate World

There are basically 3 different broad buckets of roles:

General Management

• Board of Directors
• CEO
• COO / CRO / CCO or just "Second-in-Command"
• Business Unit / Segment / Region / Division Leaders (i.e. they own a P&L)

Strategic Functions

These could all be distinct roles (at say.. a larger company) but they could also be consolidated (say at a smaller company). Basically work on exec level priorities and initiatives.

• Corporate Development / Internal M&A
• Business Development / Strategic Partnerships / Strategic Alliances 
• Strategy and Operations (a whole slew of stuff in here: corporate-level strat, BU-level strat, functional strat, business transformation, chief-of-staff etc)
• Investor Relations
• Corporate Venture Capital 
• Corporate Real Estate Management

Corporate Functions

All of your standard functions that businesses all share in common.

• Finance and Accounting (includes: Corporate FP&A, BU / Functional FP&A, Treasury and Accounting)
• HR (includes: Generalist, Business Partner, D&I, Talent Acquisition, Comp&Bens etc)
• Marketing and Communications (includes: Product Marketing, Cross-Channel Marketing, Channel-Specific Marketing, Corporate Communications & PR etc)
• Supply Chain (includes: Planning, Inventory, Logistics, Warehouse, Production etc)
• "Operations" (includes all the procedural stuff like: Operations Management, Program Management, Client Services / Support, Admin / Biz Support, Technical Support, Customer Experience, Back Office, Facilities / Workplace Services etc)
• IT (includes: IT Leadership, IT Project Management, IT Business Analysis, Security, IT Operations, IT Support, IT Infrastructure etc)
• Legal (self-explanatory)
• Risk
• Compliance / Regulations
• Internal Audit