Achieving Stakeholder Impact is the joint IRG and Oxford FOMI C-suite study on what it takes to win in the shift from shareholder to stakeholder growth. It identifies winning multistakeholder growth strategies, how impact is measured and communicated, the leadership attitudes and habits required, and the role of brands and marketing.
This version of the summary carries the study’s contributor list, which is what makes it distinctive. The contributors run from chief executives and chief financial officers through investor relations and human resources to academics, development organizations and sustainability specialists.
Key findings
- The study ran from January to June 2023, shared preliminary findings at the end of June, and published recommendations by October.
- It exists because the pendulum was swinging back. Inflation and recession were testing the resolve of leaders who supported the 2019 Business Roundtable declaration, and the risk was that the lessons would be discarded along with the concept.
- Interviews reach beyond the C-suite as usually defined, covering board directors, CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, heads of investor relations, CMOs and outside experts.
- The advisory board was assembled to represent every stakeholder group, drawing on business, academia, human resources, finance and multilateral organizations.
- The partner list spans executive search, research, business schools, marketing bodies and governance organizations, including the National Association of Corporate Directors.
The six questions and the method
The study addresses how organizations define multistakeholder growth, which initiatives made the most and least impact and why, how to balance differing interests including the pitfalls, how to measure and communicate impact, the leadership attitudes and habits needed, and the role of brands and marketing.
The approach builds on four previous global IRG studies and on Oxford FOMI’s academic research experience, combining vision interviews, a meta-analysis of published multistakeholder growth initiatives and results, and AI analysis using FOMI’s Hypertrend tool to identify themes and emerging trends.
The two institutions divide the labor. IRG leads the qualitative interview phase through its partner and participant community, and FOMI leads the meta and AI analysis through its academic network and proprietary machine learning tools.
What the contributor list shows
The contributor list is organized by company and job title, and the most striking thing about it is the range of functions represented within single organizations. At one materials company the contributors include a regional president, the chief human resources officer, the head of investor relations, a commercial and strategy director and a global marketing director.
The same pattern repeats at a dairy company, where the chief executive, chief financial officer and chief human resources officer appear alongside marketing leadership. That is what a study about balancing stakeholder interests needs: the finance and people views as well as the brand view.
A large part of the list is not corporate at all. Contributors come from United Nations bodies and development organizations, from impact investing and social business, and from a sustainability measurement firm.
Academia appears throughout, including professors of sustainable enterprise, of management and organizations, of business strategies for the base of the pyramid, and of business ethics and corporate governance, alongside a governance body and the World Economic Forum’s private sector ESG lead.
The organizations behind it
IRG describes itself as not-for-profit and independent, dedicated to shifting organizations from shareholder primacy to multistakeholder impact, and supported by WPP, Meta, Google, Optimizely, Morning Consult, the NYU School of Professional Studies, the Said Business School, CKGSB, the Exetor Group and Spencer Stuart.
The curriculum behind the programs rests on the IRG Growth Study, which included interviews with over 1,000 senior business leaders, 6,000 online survey contributions from 73 countries, and behavioral analysis of publicly available LinkedIn data from three million members.
Scope and limitations
This document announces the study and lists its contributors rather than reporting its results, which were due for full publication in October 2023.
Source
This page summarises Achieving Stakeholder Impact (ASI), by The Institute for Real Growth (IRG), Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative (FOMI) at the Saïd Business School, 2023.