Category: Sustainability
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The long twilight of hunter-gatherer capitalism
The firestorm that raged through finance and other companies over the last few years exposed the deficiencies of the current brand of capitalism. The naked greed and short-term thinking that characterised much of commercial world was over-looked as consumers enjoyed a bonanza based on the cornucopia of cheap finance. But as we stand surveying the…
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Stakeholder mapping part 2
Part one of this post featured the stakeholder map. For those who want to cast the net wider when identifying stakeholders two possibilities are online surveys and email data mining. But it may be more useful to just get started and regard the stakeholder map as an iterative process. Stakeholder mapping is one of the…
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Engaging the engagers
Your staff are potentially your best ambassadors. If they are positively engaged, both at work and outside work they will be leading your stakeholder engagement. Improving staff engagement is a win-win that will improve internal processes and strengthen external engagement. Ideally, your staff are great ambassadors for your business. When they are at work, they…
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Leading engagement
It’s no surprise that the attributes required for effective leadership are those required for effective stakeholder engagement. My website, Stakeholder Engagement offers resources for developing capability for stakeholder engagement. Alongside specific stakeholder engagement capabilities, I have identified leadership, organisational learning, communication and adaptive capacity (change) as four essential capabilities to support enhanced engagement. Compare this…
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Stakeholder mapping
Stakeholder mapping is a key process for formalising your stakeholder engagement. Follow this four step process to establish a stakeholder map. Using a matrix to rate the factors that determine the relevance of each stakeholder group will provide another perspective on your business. AccountAbility’s AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard specifies: “In order to design stakeholder engagement…
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Fence post or tree? A metaphor for engagement
A fence post and a tree are both anchored in the earth. But they achieve it in totally different ways. A fence post is typically made out of wood, or perhaps concrete. If it is wood, it may be chemically treated to protect it from the organisms of decay in the soil. It is held…
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Organising for engagement
Organisations that engage well, are generally doing well (see my online stakeholder engagement post). So how do we embed engagement processes into organisational design? As organising around hierarchy was a core process of industrial age organisations, engaging is a core process of 21st Century knowledge age organisations. This calls for a reorganisation of how we…
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Stakeholder Engagement for SMEs
Many sustainability processes, such as Accountability’s excellent AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard (AA1000SES) are complex and require significant resources to implement them to their full extent. This poses a problem for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as the resource requirements for implementing the system, could well divert those resources away from the business end of engagement.…
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Values revisited
Chances are you have worked in an organisation that has articulated its values, but somehow the process just hasn’t worked. On the other hand, for those of you that work in an organisation that lives its values, you have probably been a part of something truly special. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s recent book SuperCorp, is based…
Bruce-Iri 