Article 24
A full article recap and downloadable summary
2-3 minute read
CAPSULE SUMMARY – Thank you for your time and attention. Please share these tools freely and broadly.
24.1 If you have made it to this final article, I thank you deeply for your time and attention. I hope you have come away from these articles with a tangible set of principles and approaches that you can apply in your business, starting today.
24.2 The critical societal shift away from purely mercenary business leadership will be a long journey, and it won’t happen overnight. But every leader that guides their business down even just one of these steps and shares that progress with others will help to accelerate the flywheel.
24.3 In closing, I’d like to provide this simple check-list to summarize the most critical dimensions of the 4th Stakeholder framework. I’ve also created a PDF of this check-list for those who may want to have a ready copy.
24.4 And my simple ask for you: please send me feedback, send me success examples, and share this content with others who can benefit from an actionable approach to true stakeholder balance. Thank you again for your time and attention.
Please share this content widely with others.
THE 4TH STAKEHOLDER PLAYBOOK
A SUMMARY OF ALL 24 ARTICLES
Step 1 – Build greater positive impact into your business model
Shift your entire business model into a more purpose-driven business that de facto creates societal benefit.
If that’s not possible, identify creative ways to attach positive social impact to your existing business model such that as your business scales, society benefits.
If that’s not possible, redirect revenue/profits and/or resources to organizations or causes focused on societal improvement.
Step 2 – Reduce the damage coming from your first- AND second-order business impacts
Ensure that you are objectively tracking any immediate harm your business system creates.
Expand your mindset and incorporate second-order business impacts and harms into how you view your company’s impact on the world.
When facing second-order impacts where you are partially but not wholly responsible, proactively mobilize a Collective Action group to begin to tackle the issue.
Step 3 – Prioritize the biggest impacts first using an Impact x Responsibility Matrix
Eradicate any hint of ‘positive financial ROI only’ filtering for priorities related to the 4th Stakeholder.
Shift your prioritization from ‘what is feasible’ to ‘what needs to be done’ based on overall societal impact and your contribution to that impact.
Use an Impact x Responsibility Matrix to codify all potential positive and negative tactics (including both first- and second-order impacts) into a single view so you can prioritize the biggest swings first.
Step 4 – Build a robust Voice of Society feedback engine and commit to transparent action
Capture the Voice-of-Society feedback coming from your existing listening posts and/or create new listening posts if those are not sufficient.
Feed that raw feedback and any other internally-generated tactics into an objective and representative 4th Stakeholder Prioritization Group that can craft and continually update your Impact x Responsibility Matrix.
Feed that societally-informed matrix into your overall prioritization engine, define your action plans, and transparently publish those plans back out to society in order to create a societal accountability loop.