New Book Announcements

The Untapped Potential

Sybille Sachs, Edwin Rühli, Isabelle Kern

Who are your stakeholders, what do they expect

from you and how can your firm benefit from them?

This book provides answers to these questions and

shows you how strategically important partners can

be included into your firm's value creation, how

you and your stakeholders can benefit from each

other and how you can achieve sustainable success

in a competitive environment.

Within EABIS, stakeholders have always been identified as an important theme, both for the multi-national companies and leading business schools in our network. As a result, in 2005, the Corporate Founding Partners of EABIS – IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Shell and Unilever – agreed to co-fund the HWZ-led project behind this book as one of their first priority initiatives.

The results of the extensive research done with seven Swiss firms - most of which are either global players themselves or are subsidiaries of global corporations – were initially presented at a 2007 conference in Zurich, but are further elaborated in this book.

Many firms confirm that stakeholders are important to them. But - as the book title "Sustainable Success with Stakeholders - The Untapped Potential" suggests - firms often lack a systematic approach to stakeholder management. They lack experience in defining their strategically important stakeholders, in engaging their stakeholders in value creation initiatives, and particularly in understanding the potential benefit that stakeholders can bring to their own firm.

This book shows managers in a very hands-on manner how they can identify their stakeholders and cooperate with them in a way that is mutually successful and satisfying. The book includes numerous examples from the case studies and from international companies, illustrating the stepping stones to a comprehensive stakeholder management framework. This makes it an indispensible companion for managers of small and large firms.

In addition, the book is also well suited for management education and MBA courses as it illustrates the theoretical concepts of the Stakeholder View and their application in practice. It thus bridges the gap between theory and practice in a convincing manner. It shows how the narrow shareholder value thinking can be overcome and be replaced by a comprehensive theory of the firm.