NAME: Md Samil Farouqui COURSE: GLMI 711 UPI: mfar366

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT OF STAKEHOLDERS:

THEORY AND PRACTICE FRAN ACKERMAN & COLIN EDEN
The significance of the stakeholders can never be neglected. There is no doubt in the fact that
analyzing stakeholders is crucial to achieving success in any business or project. This article mainly
focuses on how the top management teams (TMTs) can strategize by concentrating on the key
concepts that emerge from the stakeholder literature. In many prior articles there is already much
spoken about identities and demands of the stakeholders but here in this reading author specifically
elaborates on how TMTs can manage their stakeholders efficiently so as to realize their strategic
goals.

The main three themes that the author highlights in this reading are identifying the stakeholders,
exploring the impact of the stakeholders and finally developing the stakeholder management
strategies. According to my understanding, it is very important that the strategy management should
be carried out in accordance with the goals of the organization. I am pretty much convinced with the
author as he claims that the TMT choices are made according to the targets and purpose of the
organization and moreover their management efforts will prioritize those stakeholders who they
believe are most relevant to its strategic future.

The famous and ubiquitous Power-interest Grid has always played a significant role in defining
stakeholders. The author has explained this grid for enabling managers to proactively manage their
stakeholders. I believe this is a sound structure but its pretty much evident that for the technique to
be applied successfully, more emphasis on disaggregation is required as it helps TMTs to focus on
the organizations ability to manage its stakeholders strategically. For explanation, lets take an
example of highly aggregated stakeholder like the Government which comprises of subgroups like
Department of Environment and Department of Trade. Its possible that the trade department may
have both power and interest while the Environment department may have only power but lack
interest. Hence they require different management strategies. So I think that the four quadrants that
we obtain from the grid add some structure that supports the disaggregation and discovery process.

Stakeholders power can often be described in relation to their position in the network of other
stakeholders. The author depicts this scenario by means of Stakeholder Influence Network
Diagram. According to my understanding, this network requires adapting the power-interest matrix
because the network analysis shows some stakeholders to be more or less influential than is
previously supposed.

Power-interest grid and the network influence diagrams failed to explicitly address the
management of stakeholders. So the author felt the need of introducing a new technique viz.
Stakeholder Management Web whereby all the Players selected from the power-interest grid were
refined in the light of their network links. The goal was to record the actions, objectives, and
motivations of all the specific key stakeholders. Although the author sounds convincing about this
technique being effective but I doubt whether its efficient in contemporary time considering the
dynamics, heterogeneity and the increasing complexity with an increase in the number of
stakeholders.
 The greatest strength of this article is that its not only just a theory or a literature but in actual
its the analysis of 15 years of research carried out in 16 organizations and moreover it undertook
single episode interventions for a minimum of a 2 day session with each TMT, involving all members
in each case. Each intervention helped to further refine the stakeholder management method. So
the holistic methodology that is developed incrementally was effective in both theory and practice
as well.

So to conclude we can claim that this article is based on the scientific research and it supports the
need for using techniques that are grounded in theory to provide a rational way for TMTs to exploit
their knowledge to discuss and analyze actions about managing stakeholders more effectively. I
believe the findings from this article resonate with the internal ambiguity aspect and indicate that
there might be fundamentally different claims and views on an issue within one stakeholder
organization. TMTs can develop more comprehensive strategies by exploiting the three techniques
thoroughly in a cyclical manner. The interaction between the three themes as operationalized in
their respective techniques is going to benefit the TMTs. That said, the research reported here needs
to be extended to further depth. Extensive research into whether any public or non-profit
organizations gain different benefits than private sector firms would definitely add some extra value
to the stakeholder literature. Various readings and also the current experiences suggest that the
priorities within various role-based stakeholder groups are rarely homogenous. Difference,
heterogeneity and the number of stakeholders are likely to increase for sure, raising the complexity
of stakeholder management and hence we can rightly comment that paying attention to the
strategic management of stakeholders is becoming very significant.