Good Stakeholder Quotes

Good companies have a good impact on all of its stakeholders. Everyone that the company interacts with should experience a value-add of some kind. And every environment in which the company operates should experience a value-add of some kind. And if done right, this will also drive up profits for the company.

Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!

It does not matter whether your company does have a good logo or bad logo. What matters most is the way you position your company before your stakeholders. The more you see a logo, the more you like it and you talk about it

Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.

How to Survive Racism in an Organization that Claims to be Antiracist: 10. Ask why they want you. Get as much clarity as possible on what the organization has read about you, what they understand about you, what they assume are your gifts and strengths. What does the organization hope you will bring to the table? Do those answers align with your reasons for wanting to be at the table? 9. Define your terms. You and the organization may have different definitions of words like "justice", "diveristy", or "antiracism". Ask for definitions, examples, or success stories to give you a better idea of how the organization understands and embodies these words. Also ask about who is in charge and who is held accountable for these efforts. Then ask yourself if you can work within the structure. 8. Hold the organization to the highest vision they committed to for as long as you can. Be ready to move if the leaders aren't prepared to pursue their own stated vision. 7. Find your people. If you are going to push back against the system or push leadership forward, it's wise not to do so alone. Build or join an antiracist cohort within the organization. 6. Have mentors and counselors on standby. Don't just choose a really good friend or a parent when seeking advice. It's important to have on or two mentors who can give advice based on their personal knowledge of the organization and its leaders. You want someone who can help you navigate the particular politics of your organization. 5. Practice self-care. Remember that you are a whole person, not a mule to carry the racial sins of the organization. Fall in love, take your children to the park, don't miss doctors' visits, read for pleasure, dance with abandon, have lots of good sex, be gentle with yourself. 4. Find donors who will contribute to the cause. Who's willing to keep the class funded, the diversity positions going, the social justice center operating? It's important for the organization to know the members of your cohort aren't the only ones who care. Demonstrate that there are stakeholders, congregations members, and donors who want to see real change. 3. Know your rights. There are some racist things that are just mean, but others are against the law. Know the difference, and keep records of it all. 2. Speak. Of course, context matters. You must be strategic about when, how, to whom, and about which situations you decide to call out. But speak. Find your voice and use it. 1. Remember: You are a creative being who is capable of making change. But it is not your responsibility to transform an entire organization.

Much like a house mortgaged to a bank today, mortgaged slaves were security for those who put up the money for the mortgage, to whom the slaves were “conveyed.” A mortgage financier might be a merchant, a church with an investment portfolio, a college, a bank, or, commonly, a wealthy individual with a large slavehold. A slave put up for sale had to be warranted not only of “good character” (not criminal-minded or rebellious) but “free of all incumbrance” (not already mortgaged).14 Slaveowners had physical possession of, and legal title to, the enslaved, but to speak only of the slaveowners is to underestimate how broad was the stakeholding.

Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster. By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations were too fat—employing workers they didn’t need, and paying them too much—and they were too tied to their communities. It is a tempting argument, but in hindsight a fallacious one. Any change that allows some people to become better off without causing others to be worse off is technically a more “efficient” use of resources. But when all or most of these efficiency gains go to a few people at the top—as has been the case since the 1980s—the common good is not necessarily improved. Just look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities now littering the nation. Then look at the record corporate profits, soaring CEO pay, and jaw-dropping compensation on Wall Street. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy, and most stakeholders have not done well.

Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible, and collaborative. They never invest too much in their ideas, because they know they will have to alter them. They know there’s no right place to start, so they simply start somewhere and see what happens. They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after it’s solved than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough. They’re never convinced they know enough to solve the problem, so they’re constantly testing their ideas on different stakeholders.

George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As

CSR is the way in which business consistently creates shared value in society through economic development, good governance, stakeholder responsiveness and environmental improvement. Put another way, CSR is an integrated, systemic approach by business that builds, rather than erodes or destroys, economic, social, human and natural capital.

It is about time companies shifted from the simple strategies to earn a mere operation license towards earning a leadership license, that is, they should serve the needs of both their shareholders and stakeholders by making profits while also being a positive driver in society”.

Ask residents of Manhattan what functions the city provides for them, and they will give you an impressive list. Do this for all the various stakeholders in the city, and you will have a pretty good set of requirements for Manhattan. This would be a useful exercise for city planners or for anyone considering starting a business in the city. In summary, then, the fact that not all systems are requirements-driven does not diminish the value of analyzing requirements. Whether we carry out the analysis before or after the system exists, it still has great benefits.

In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.” I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one. How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying. Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces.

THE ROAR of the death blast on the Avenue of the Americas cannot be heard in faraway Johannesburg. With eight weeks to go to the opening game in Soccer City, Sepp Blatter and his South African capos have enough problems. Outraged by price gouging, fans are staying home. In the townships citizens protest every day; ‘Service riots’ send messages to politicians that public money should be spent on homes, water, sewage plants and jobs, not stadiums that will become white elephants. Why should they listen? They have the police beat back the protestors. The World Cup is good news for Danny Jordaan, leader of the bid and now chief executive for the tournament. Quietly, his brother Andrew has been given a well-paid job as Hospitality liaison with MATCH Event Services at the Port Elizabeth stadium. A stakeholder in the MATCH company is Sepp Blatter’s nephew Philippe Blatter. The majority owners are Mexican brothers Jaime and Enrique Byrom, based in Manchester, England, Zurich, Switzerland and with some of their bank accounts in Spain and the Isle of Man. The Brothers are not happy. Sepp Blatter awarded them the lucrative 2010 hospitality contract aimed at wealthy football patrons, mostly from abroad. If that wasn’t enough, Blatter also gave them the contract to manage and distribute the three million tickets. The brothers are charging top rates for hotels and internal flights and expected to make huge profits. Instead, they are on their way to losing $50 million. They plan to recoup these losses in Brazil in four years time.

A focus on top line revenues tends to be great for stakeholders such as employees, suppliers and bankers, but rarely for minority shareholders. Sticking to what you’re good at is often a good tenet.

Hopefully, by this point in the book, you’re on board with the importance of Commercial Insight to any Mobilizer engagement effort. It’s central as well to the process of qualifying Mobilizers. The first step in this exercise is to lead with a thought-provoking insight and gauge the customer’s reaction to it. Remember, Commercial Insight is the Mobilizer dog whistle—only they can hear it and only they will understand the potential it holds for their organizations. This is what you’re looking for right off the bat—engagement around the insight you’ve just put on the table. You’ve approached the customer with an insight or set of insights that teaches them something new and changes the way they think about their business. Done well, this is a provocative insight—provocative because it challenges the customer’s current worldview, the mental model they have about how things are supposed to work. It’s not unlike what you might see in one of those detective shows. The detectives have the suspect in the interrogation room . . . warming him up with some softball questions and then . . . BOOM!—they drop a critical piece of information on the suspect just to gauge his reaction. Just like a master detective, that’s what we’re looking for. We want to gauge our stakeholder’s reaction to our Commercial Insight. If you approach the customer with valuable insight, how do they react? Do they tune you out, or do they stay engaged? Someone who doesn’t even engage with the content of your teaching is almost certainly unlikely to drive change around that idea across the customer organization. If they don’t engage at all, or simply accept the insight at face value, chances are pretty good you’re dealing with either a Blocker (we’ll talk more about how to handle Blockers later in the book), who’s likely against the idea, or a Friend or a Guide, who is never going to dig deep enough to forge consensus around the idea.

The purpose of product discovery is to quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. The output of product discovery is a validated product backlog. Specifically, this means getting answers to four critical questions: Will the user buy this (or choose to use it)? Can the user figure out how to use this? Can our engineers build this? Can our stakeholders support this?

A good rule of thumb for targeting the right stakeholders is to look for the person who has control of the budgetary resources allotted to resolve the pain point you solve. Or, alternatively, the person who spends meaningful amounts of time (i.e., labor resources), day to day, resolving that pain point.

we will discuss in the Winning section, we should advocate for plenty of time to present our solution. We can use part of the presentation time to facilitate an Opportunity dialogue with the client stakeholders. We might start off by saying, “Our goal is to provide you with a solution that exactly meets your needs. Toward that end there are some things we know and some things we don’t know. Your company has given us some good background information—sufficient to come here today with a good hypothesis of what will work. However, we haven’t had a chance to speak with you personally and wouldn’t feel comfortable making a final recommendation without more fully understanding your perspective on what needs to happen. Before we present our solution, would you mind if we ask you a few questions?

Working ethically is a skill, and it’s a skill that needs to be taught and then developed. It’s not easy to tell the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that the product they just asked you to design is harmful. It takes more than guts. It takes knowing what questions to ask. It takes knowing how to test the effects of the product. It takes knowing how to build a good argument. And it takes seeing yourself as an equal stakeholder in the product. It takes seeing yourself as a gatekeeper. And frankly, it takes some designers who’ve come from backgrounds and experiences that were harmed by the products of Fortune 500 companies. It takes a lot.

preparation for this role. Start by becoming an expert in your users and customers. Share very openly what you learn, both the good and the bad. Become your team's and your company's go‐to person for understanding anything about your customer—quantitative and qualitative. Work to establish a strong relationship with your key stakeholders and business partners. Convince them of two things: (1) You understand the constraints they operate under. (2) You will only bring to them solutions that you believe will work within those constraints. Become an undisputed expert on your product and your industry. Again, share your knowledge openly and generously. Finally, work very hard to build and nurture the strong collaborative relationship with your product team. I'm

Sometimes good results are not celebrated by all because the process fouled, excluded or ignored those that hold the stake. This is when the means justifies the ends.

The good news is that the trade-offs between accuracy and good behavior can also be quantified, allowing stakeholders to make informed decisions.

In the absence of social goods, ‘profit-first’ economic growth has fed a crony capitalism that serves not the common good but speculators in the ‘liquid economy.’ Collateral banking systems, offshore sites providing fiscal havens for corporate tax avoidance, extracting value from companies to boost the earnings of shareholders at the expense of stakeholders, the smoke-and-mirrors world of derivatives and credit default swaps-all these suck capital from the real economy and undermine a healthy market, creating historically unprecedented levels of inequality. There is a major disjuncture between the awareness of social rights on the one hand and the distribution of actual opportunities on the other. The stupendous rise in inequality of recent decades is not a stage of growth but a brake on it, and the root of many social ills in the twenty-first century. Barely more than one percent of the world’s population owns half of its wealth. A market detached from morality, dazzled by its own complex engineering, which privileges profit and competition above all else, means not just spectacular wealth for a few but also poverty and deprivation for many. Millions are robbed of hope.

We were not just encountable to shareholders-we were accountable to a myriad of interwoven stakeholders.

In this way, you can run a large company and think big but operate small. They’re not necessarily at odds. Big means more offerings, scalability, sustainability, and maximizing value for all your stakeholders. Small means you’re building relationships in your communities, giving customers one-to-one service, and tailoring your offerings to local needs.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

Before Entry Read internal and external perspectives on the market and consumers. You won’t become an expert, but that’s OK; awareness is what you’re after. Identify local consultants who can brief you on the state of the market and the competitive environment. Learn the language—it’s not about fluency; it’s about respect. Develop some hypotheses about the business situation you are entering. – Use the STARS model to talk with your new boss and other stakeholders about the situation. – Assess the leadership team—is it functioning well, and does it comprise a good mix of new and veteran, or local and expatriate, talent? – Assess the overall organization using any available corporate performance and talent-pool data. – If possible, talk to some team members to gather their insights and test some of your early hypotheses. After Entry Your first day, first week, and first month are absolutely critical. Without the following four-phase plan, you risk getting drawn into fighting fires rather than proactively leading change. Diagnose the situation and align the leadership team around some early priorities. Establish strategic direction and align the organization around it. Repair critical processes and strive for execution consistency. Develop local leadership talent to lay the foundation for your eventual exit.

Conscious Capitalism is not about being virtuous or doing well by doing good. It is a way of thinking about business that is more conscious of its higher purpose, its impacts on the world, and the relationships it has with its various constituencies and stakeholders. It reflects a deeper consciousness about why businesses exist and how they can create more value.

And an Executive Business Review? An executive business review (EBR) should present information at a much higher level, with a focus on executive leadership. It is one of the most influential meetings you will have with your customer all year, yet it’s the one most organizations tend to forget. QBRs happen frequently, across the industry, but EBRs? Not so much. Less tactical and less operational than a QBR, an EBR is typically reserved for your customer’s executive leadership team because it’s a high-level review of the value your product is providing the customer. When you draft an EBR, you should be thinking along the lines of, Who is my stakeholder’s boss? How do I co-present to my stakeholder and their boss the value my product has offered and will continue to offer them? An EBR is a way to move up the value chain, promote your stakeholder’s brand inside their own company, and share wins with the executive leader. It’s a strategic meeting that should focus on reinforcing the value in your customer ROI. It should also validate the goals of the organization, because like you did with your QBRs, you’re building a partnership through open dialogue. The only difference is now you’re doing it at an executive level. EBRs should be scheduled twice a year. I typically recommend scheduling one at least three months before the customer’s renewal because if the meeting goes well, it may help move the renewal along faster. I have seen executives stop pushing on price when they’re negotiating terms, and I’ve even seen some CSMs contact a stakeholder’s executive directly to ask for their help. “We’re having trouble with this renewal. Can you step in and assist?” More often than not, the executive will call whoever they need to call and say, “Just get it done.” Plus, when you reach out and ask for help, you’re engaging executive-level advocates, which is always a good thing.

Soon word began to filter south that the whole enterprise was a fool’s errand, that all the gold-rich territory had been claimed, that the only people getting wealthy in the Klondike were the early stakeholders and entrepreneurs who had established businesses catering to the gold rush hordes. One of these was Frederick Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, an immigrant who had dodged the draft in Germany, fled to the United States, and made a small fortune opening hotels in the Yukon riverbank towns of Bennett and Whitehorse.

pressures and intense learning curve It takes time to get up to speed on the content of your new position, and yet business and markets cannot slow down and wait for you to catch up. Decisions still need to be taken and, consequently, the pressure can build up and will need to be managed in order to stay operating effectively. Being overwhelmed with immediate fire-fighting and task-driven priorities It would be tempting to get busy and dive into the immediate business tasks and issues. But you need to have the strength of character to step back and take time out to look at the big picture: what tasks should you continue, what should you stop, and what should you start? Need to invest energy in building new networks and forging new stakeholder relationships There is no point in having the right vision and strategy in isolation of bringing people with you. The culture may be dense and slow-moving – people may be resistant to the changes you bring. Invest early in the influencer and stakeholder network. Dealing with legacy issues from the predecessor Depending on the quality of your predecessor, your unit may or may not have a good reputation, and your team may have developed poor habits, behaviours and disciplines that will take time to address. Or you may have to endure the scenario of filling the shoes of a much-loved predecessor, and being initially resented as the new guy whose mandate is to change how things have always been done before. Challenges on inheriting or building a team and having to make tough personnel decisions Don’t expect underperformers to have been weeded out prior to your arrival. A key task in your first 100 days will be to assess the quality of your team: who stays, who goes and what fresh talent is needed on board. Unfortunately, your best talent is possibly now de-motivated and resentful – and consequently underperforming – because they applied unsuccessfully for your job. For external appointments, a lack of experience of the new company culture may lead to inadvertent gaffes and early political blunders – all of which can take time to recover From the innocuous to the significant, everything you do is being judged as indicative of your character. Checking your smart device during a meeting may deeply offend your new role stakeholders who may judge that action as an indication that you are brash, uninterested and arrogant. You will need to be on ‘hyper alert’ to consciously pick up clues on the acceptable norms and behaviours in your new culture. Getting the balance right between moving too fast and moving too slowly Newly appointed people sometimes panic and this can result in either doing too much (scattergun approach, but not tackling the core issues) or doing too little (‘I’ll just listen and learn for the first three months, and then decide what to do’). Neither extreme cuts it. Find the right balance.

The agile coach is a new role that requires a selection of soft skills to be successfully. A good agile coach will be able to build the team, and coach them in decision-making, problem solving and conflict resolution. The agile coach should also facilitate that the team learns from their experience, that project impediments are quickly removed, and that the stakeholder’s expectations are managed.

In the absence of those predictions, product and strategy decisions are far more difficult and time-consuming. I often see this in my consulting practice. I’ve been called in many times to help a startup that feels that its engineering team “isn’t working hard enough.” When I meet with those teams, there are always improvements to be made and I recommend them, but invariably the real problem is not a lack of development talent, energy, or effort. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently. Thus the downward cycle begins: the product development team valiantly tries to build a product according to the specifications it is receiving from the creative or business leadership. When good results are not forthcoming, business leaders assume that any discrepancy between what was planned and what was built is the cause and try to specify the next iteration in greater detail. As the specifications get more detailed, the planning process slows down, batch size increases, and feedback is delayed. If a board of directors or CFO is involved as a stakeholder, it doesn’t take long for personnel changes to follow.

Another reason why we cannot combine targets and forecasts is because a good target needs to have an element of stretch and ambition. When setting targets, we cannot just sit in a dark room, or look back to last year and add on a few percentages. We need to look out the window to the world outside, to customers, shareholders, communities, and all the other external stakeholders, with expectations about our performance and behavior. While the window is open, it might be wise also to take a look at the competition and how fast it is running. When we close the window and reflect on what we have seen, it is not unlikely that what we have observed has an effect on our ambition level. Setting ambitious targets is less a decision we take and more a consequence of what is happening around us, whether we like what we see or not. At the same time, we need those good and reliable forecasts. We must understand where we are heading, how big the gaps are against our ambitions and targets, and where we need to focus our attention and energy to catch up. Forcing a target and a forecast into one number in one process is almost guaranteed to result in either a bad target or a bad forecast. Or very often both, since we negotiate and compromise and end up with a number somewhere in between.

In our Berkeley class, we required each team to conduct at least ten interviews a week, to learn from real customers and stakeholders.

Remarkably, in the vast majority of companies (not the ones that are good at product), the actual product teams don't do much ideation themselves. This is because what's really going on is that the ideas are already handed to the product teams in the form of prioritized features on product roadmaps, where most of the items on those roadmaps are coming either from requests from big customers (or prospective customers), or from company stakeholders or execs. Unfortunately, these are rarely the quality of ideas we're looking for.

Words: so innocent and powerless as they are standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Two key markets under capitalism are thereby done away with: the traditional labor market and capital markets. But markets for goods and services remain. Too many informational problems exist for them to be done away with. Companies will also still have to compete with each other—inefficient firms will collapse (though the fall for individual stakeholders in a firm would be cushioned by the welfare state, even more so than it was

Happy employees who love their companies manifest this love in their work, product, and service—and customers can just sense that. In my mind, a happy employee means a happy customer. Your employees are your key stakeholders, so if they are engaged and impassioned about your purpose and