Self-centric perspective

Shared leadership

In the past, strategic management has been mainly built around the notion that firms need to exploit their inimitable and fiercely defended advantages vis-a-vis their competitors' in order to appropriate rents for their owners, from a presumably fixed "pie". In this view, stakeholders' interests have only gained attention from an instrumental perspective: For example, if stakeholders controlled critical resources or because they have been found to be an important source of innovation. Stakeholders were only perceived as contributors to the firms’ success. This corresponds to a reactive, defensive and even negatively framed approach.

New narratives have been initiated to explore more constructive approaches. Leaders in firms and in stakeholder organizations should be seen as mutual value creators exploring and enhancing complementary potentials. The focus is on how mutuality evolves and stabilizes in stakeholder networks, not only to distribute a given resource / income pie but also to enlarge the entire pie and the contributors' slices.[i]

In one of our research projects we could observe the following situation: A corporation was seeking innovative product solutions. Its management had realized that the current research and development process was no longer successful. As a result, they broadened the cast of stakeholders and deepened their involvement. They decided to initiate a multi-stakeholder dialogue, by bringing in all the experience and knowledge of a broad cast of stakeholders. The responsible manager created a core team that was in charge of developing the overall concept for a truly multi-stakeholder dialogue. The core team consisted of a manager of the company, representatives of a public relations agency of the corporation, technical experts for their products, plus a moderator who was in charge of facilitating the multi-stakeholder dialogue. At the first meeting with the stakeholders, the core team realized that it was not appropriate for them to manage the dialogue alone. They sought a format in which all stakeholders could partake as partners. During the second workshop, the representatives of the different stakeholder organizations began to realize that as partners in this process, they were confronted with similar challenges as the corporation and the core team. It took time to find common ground on how an innovative solution could be found for the product that was focused on. Some of the stakeholders began to accept that they should all submit to a paradigm shift, in which they would contribute constructively as partners.

In such cases, mutual value creation takes place between the firm and the stakeholders and acknowledges value distribution for all involved parties.

(Sachs & Rühli (2011), Stakeholders Matter - A New Paradigm for Strategy in Society, Cambridge University Press)

back