Established model
Stakeholder theory
R. Edward Freeman · 1984
A company is answerable to everyone who can affect it or is affected by it, not to shareholders alone.
Its place in the frameworkBusiness Core›Stakeholders
What it does
Its practical core is an instruction to identify those groups explicitly and to treat their interests as inputs to strategy rather than as constraints discovered later. The argument is not primarily ethical: relationships that are managed produce better information and fewer surprises than relationships that are merely endured.
- Reach for it when
- Whenever a decision’s consequences reach past the people in the room.
- Where it stops
- It gives no rule for what to do when interests genuinely conflict, which is exactly when the question gets hard.
R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Pitman, 1984.
Why it sits at Stakeholders
Everyone with a claim on the organisation or a stake in what it does — owners, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, the surrounding community.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- IdentificationFreeman’s stakeholder theory, and the salience model’s reading of power, legitimacy and urgency.
- ExpectationsStakeholder analysis practice on eliciting rather than inferring expectations.
- EngagementThe power-interest grid, which sorts groups into manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed and monitor.
- ReportingCorporate reporting practice, including the shift towards reporting that addresses stakeholders other than shareholders.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Stakeholders lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Goal CorePurpose names who the organisation is for; this object names everyone it affects.
- Brand CorePerception is formed by stakeholders, not only by customers.
- Data CoreReporting is where measurement meets obligation.
- Business CoreCompliance covers the stakeholders whose expectations are written into law.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Stakeholders too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The power–interest gridPlace each stakeholder by how much power they hold and how much they care, and how to treat them follows.
Elsewhere in Business Core
- Tuckman’s stages of group development
- Belbin Team Roles
- Herzberg’s two-factor theory
- Jobs to be done
- The Kano model
- The value proposition canvas
- The business model canvas
- The Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter
- Value-based pricing
- Core competence
- VRIO
- The resource-based view
- The theory of constraints
- Lean thinking
- Co-opetition and the value net
- Transaction cost economics
- DuPont analysis
- Break-even and cost–volume–profit analysis
- Unit economics
- The Kraljic Matrix
- The bullwhip effect
- The SCOR Model
- On-time in-full
- Overall equipment effectiveness
- Value stream mapping
- The three lines model
- ISO 31000 risk management
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Kotter’s eight-step change model
- Situational leadership
- The Lean Startup
- Design thinking
- Porter’s value chain
- The McKinsey 7S framework
- The growth–share matrix
- Six Sigma and DMAIC
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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