Global Compact International Yearbook 2013
13
In the future, the currently still dominant focus on shareholders
and target groups will no longer be able to cope with the rapid
pace of change in the business environment. Shareholders
are an important stakeholder group for sustainable business
success, but not the only such group. Nowadays, the task of a
future-proof and sustainable strategy is rather that of weighing
up the requirements of politics, society, business, and science
and aligning them with corporate goals. The so-called license
to trade depends not only on dialogue with all relevant interest
groups and opinion leaders: Stakeholders and target groups do
not simply expect information about activities and decisions
from businesses, they want instead to be actively involved
and integrated in discussions and decision-making processes.
Businesses and institutions are therefore confronted with a
dual task: (1) What are the (new) procedures that we need to
establish for the involvement and participation of external
and internal stakeholders? (2) What kinds of interactive and
communicative innovations might take us beyond informa-
tion exchange and simple dialogue with stakeholders and
create added value?
It is these challenges that are investigated in a new report,
for which we interviewed around 100 stakeholder managers
from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The study is titled
“
Stakeholder Integration: the contribution made by corporate
communications and sustainability management to value crea-
tion.” It is a project being carried out through a cooperation
between Lintemeier Stakeholder Relations, Knobel Corporate
Communications, and the MHMK (Macromedia University for
Media and Communication) and serves as a descriptive analysis
of the current situation. It provides unique insights into the
structure of stakeholder management; identifies its substan-
tive and methodological foci; describes its fields of activity
and how its operative managers understand their roles; and
identifies different models of integration of internal as well as
external stakeholders. The companies surveyed were divided
into four roughly equal groups according to sales volume: up to
€100 million, up to €500 million, up to €5 billion, and over
€5 billion. Here we describe the most important findings from
the results of the study.
Paradigm shift: From shareholder value to stakeholder
value?
The philosophy of corporate leadership is undergoing a para-
digm shift. In the future, a strong orientation toward share-
holders among managers will be complemented by a greater
emphasis on a stakeholder approach, one which recognizes
that the providers of capital represent a group with legitimate,
but not exclusive, claims on companies. The rapid pace of
change in the business environment and the need for speed
and flexibility in strategic decision making mean that early
involvement in the strategic process of groups with legitimate
interests – recognizing those interests, dealing with them,
and managing them – is essential. The interests of (often
critical) social groups, in particular, are frequently articulated
to businesses and pursued in public – sometimes with great
professionalism. This calls for corporate management that
works through – and not against – such interests in order
to enable sustainably effective corporate decision making.
Over the long term, actions that conflict with perceived social
values will jeopardize an organization. Conversely, potential
gains can only be realized if stakeholders’ interests are consist-
ently integrated into corporate strategy. As R. Edward Freeman
argues, stakeholders’ interests increasingly converge over
time. This suggests a developmental process: If stakeholders’
interests align ever more closely with each other, then the
stakeholders in question will gradually – and naturally –
come together, forming alliances in the worst-case scenario.
If the social momentum achieved by these cooperating actors
grows proportionately, these actors may then be able to assert
their interests successfully, for example through legislation.
In most cases, this is the least desirable outcome, because it
restricts the company’s room for maneuver. It follows that
companies need to address stakeholders’ interests and inte-
grate them into their business processes. If companies are not
proactive in this way, they may find themselves compelled
to act due to new state regulations. Over the medium term,
management of stakeholders becomes management for stake-
holders. This would probably represent the most radical shift
imaginable for today’s managers.
Stakeholder management in companies has been imple-
mented mainly in a descriptive manner until now; interest
groups are, at best, informed about corporate plans. How-
ever, the potential to involve them in strategic discussion
and decision-making processes goes much further. In the
future, a more normative perspective and the associated
concept of shareholder value will gravitate to the center of
corporate activity –with the recognition that stakeholders
are a constitutive element of business success. Their strategic
and systematic integration will become one of the decisive
factors in any such success.
The digitalization of communications is strengthening
networks among stakeholders
The reasons for this lie in a coming of age and an increase in
autonomy in those stakeholder groups that, until now, had
been unable to properly articulate or assert their interests vis
à vis companies and institutions.
New channels of communication have given rise to greater
powers of interest assertion, which can hamper – or even
prevent – the implementation of strategic decisions such
as investments in infrastructural measures or bringing new
Agenda
Stakeholder Management