ABSTRACT
Business is about how customers, suppliers, employees, financiers (stockholders, bondholders, banks, etc.), communities, and managers interact and create value. And, the executive's or entrepreneur's job is to manage and shape the relationships, hence the title, “managing for stakeholders”. Stakeholder diagram with company in the middle and the primary stakeholder, financiers, suppliers, employees, customers, and communities, closest to the middle and in outer rim there are secondary stakeholders such as consumer advocate groups, competitors, special interest groups, media, and government. To create value for stakeholders, executives must understand that business is fully situated in the realm of humanity. Businesses are human institutions populated by real live complex human beings. Stakeholders have names and faces and children. As such, matters of ethics are routine when one takes a managing for stakeholders' approach. Of course this should go without saying, but a part of the dominant story about business is that business people are only in it for their own narrowly defined self-interest.
