Network of Stakeholders: Bring the Right Value to the Right Stakeholder

The ultimate purpose of an organization is to create value. But before any value is created, a leader must have a sound understanding of who are expecting value from his/her organization — all sorts of stakeholders who define what types of value are worth creating.

Speaking of stakeholders, the first thought, probably also the only one, that comes to most people’s mind is the customer. Yes, the customer is a stakeholder of paramount importance, but it’s not the only one. By focusing too much on customer and customer alone, we are taking a short-term and profit-only based approach that can put our future prospects in jeopardy. There are other stakeholders that are equally indispensable for our organization, each expecting different types of value from us. Only when we are able to deliver the right value to all the stakeholders can we really triumph in the world of fierce competition and uncertainty.

The Stakeholders Diagram

The diagram above illustrates the various stakeholders of an organization and the different types of value that they are seeking from it. Let’s imagine that a company is developing a new…