15 Best Books on Stakeholder Management

In today’s highly networked and competitive global economy, mounting social and environmental problems are forcing corporations to focus on more than just their stockholders’ interest in meeting bottom-line profitability. More and more companies are recognizing the value of identifying and building relationships with all of their organization’s stakeholders-employees, customers, suppliers, and even communities. In fact, recent research has shown that companies that treat their employees well, create jobs in the local economy, develop innovative products and services, take care of the environment, and contribute to the community, are often more profitable.

In The Stakeholder Strategy, sociologist Ann Svendsen presents an effective and practical step-by-step guide that companies can use to forge a network of powerful and profitable collaborative stakeholder relationships.

While some forward-thinking corporations have tried limited collaborative approaches-focusing on one stakeholder group at a time-few have taken a comprehensive and strategic approach to build relationships with all of their stakeholders, notes Svendsen. And, while considerable commitment to the idea of stakeholder collaboration exists, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding about how to develop these relationships. The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to show business leaders and managers how to establish and maintain positive, mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships. Based on a synthesis of ideas from community relations, corporate philanthropy, stakeholder management, organizational change, sustainability, and the corporate social responsibility literature, it offers an integrated framework, as well as the practical tools for developing new kinds of collaborative relationships.

Svendsen uses easy-to-grasp concepts from everyday life, such as the process we go through in finding a mate or developing a long-term friendship, to illustrate these relationship-building strategies. She lays out the steps a company should take to create a collaboration-friendly organization: establishing a social mission, values, and ethical guidelines; assessing corporate readiness for collaboration; and making changes in communication, information, and reward systems to support internal and external collaboration. Featuring case study examples from companies in North America and Europe who are working to build collaborative relationships with their stakeholders, The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to provide a detailed explanation of how to conduct stakeholder audits and social audits so that companies can evaluate their relationship-building success and keep on track.

When asking people in product management about one thing they find difficult in their work, a typical answer is: “saying no”. Saying no effectively is not as easy as it seems and can’t be done in the same way all the time. In fact, saying no sometimes seems like an impossible thing to do. Saying no often as a product owner or product manager means you’re saying yes to the right things. An essential skill to increase your effectiveness in stakeholder management. How do you deal with your stakeholders? How can stakeholder management be done effectively? And how do you say no? These and other questions are answered in this book; Master the Art of No. The many practical examples and insights, which the authors draw from their many years of experience as product managers, professional trainers, and consultants, offer you valuable tips and tools in order to take action in the area of stakeholder management. Are you not a product leader, product manager, or Product Owner, but do you want to become more effective in stakeholder management? Even then this book is an absolute must-read!

Are you struggling to engage your key stakeholders?

• Do you lose sleep the night before important meetings because you are worried about how things will turn out?
• Have you failed to complete an important project on time because you didn’t know how to get people to stick to their commitments?
• Do you wish you had a straightforward guide to making relationship-building easy?

If you would like to become better at influencing and persuasion, but don’t know where to begin, then start here!

Stakeholder Management: 50 Quick and Easy Ways That you can Become Brilliant at Project Stakeholder Management explains the essential steps to successful stakeholder management, using a step-by-step approach
You will learn:

• How to easily identify all of your key stakeholder groups
• How to quickly build enthusiasm and motivation
• How to get people to commit to your delivery dates
• How to create an army of advocates who support your project from start to finish
• When to turn on the charm and when to turn up the heat
• When to say no to difficult stakeholders

This is a no-nonsense, tips based book intended to be used to boost results:

• The book supports the entire stakeholder management process and includes tips aimed at both beginners and more seasoned practitioners
• It can be read from cover to cover but is better off being used as a reference guide that you can dip into as and when you need help
• You can master the essential stakeholder management skills in as little as 30 days.

Who is this book for? Those who stand to benefit most from this book include:

• Project management professionals, including Project Managers, Program Managers, Project Directors, Portfolio Managers, and Project Management Office (PMO) Managers;
• Consultants, researchers, and analysts including Management Consultants, Business Consultants, Business Analysts, Requirements Managers, Independent Consultants and Business Owners;
• Those responsible for managing resources, including Practice Managers, Line Managers, and Resource Managers ;
• Business Managers and leaders, including Executive Management, Line Managers / Operations Managers with project responsibilities;
• Those responsible for project funding and benefits management, including Project Sponsors, Finance Directors, Project Directors, Account Managers, Account Directors;
• New and aspiring managers looking to develop and progress their careers and needing to learn how to cultivate and develop business relationships

One of the most challenging aspects of projects is managing stakeholder expectations and getting their commitment and buy-in to the project. Written by an experienced Project Management consultant, trainer, and coach, this book will provide you with the know-how, techniques, and templates you need to conduct robust stakeholder management on your projects. The approach described here is scalable. On large complex projects, you should perform rigorous and robust stakeholder management to the extent described in the book. On smaller, less complex projects, you need to apply the spirit of the method. Stakeholder engagement is one of the most important keys to successful projects. Having a tried-and-tested set of stakeholder management tools is essential for all project managers. This book provides an essential and up-to-date toolkit for project managers to identify, assess and engage their stakeholders. It is packed with free-to-use tools and templates that experienced project managers use to successfully manage their stakeholders. No waffle, page filling theory, or unnecessary padding. Practical. Relevant. Useful.

This is a pragmatic, hands-on, up-to-date guide to determining right and wrong in the business world. Joseph Weiss integrates a stakeholder perspective with an issues-oriented approach so students look at how a business’s actions affect not just share price and profit but the well-being of employees, customers, suppliers, the local community, the larger society, other nations, and the environment.

Weiss uses a wealth of contemporary examples, including twenty-three customized cases that immerse students directly in recent business ethics dilemmas and ask them to consider how they would resolve them. The recent economic collapse raised ethical issues that have yet to be resolved—there could not be a better time for a fully updated edition of Weiss’s classic, accessible blend of theory and practice.

New to the Sixth Edition!

New Cases! Fourteen of the twenty-three cases in this book are brand new to this edition. They touch on issues such as cyberbullying, fracking, neuromarketing, and for-profit education and involve institutions like Goldman Sachs, Google, Kaiser Permanente, Walmart, Ford, and Facebook.

Updated Throughout! The text has been updated with the latest research, including new national ethics survey data, perspectives on generational differences, and global and international issues. Each chapter includes recent business press stories touching on ethical issues.

New Feature! Several chapters now feature a unique Point/Counterpoint exercise that challenges students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue, such as too-big-to-fail institutions, the Boston bomber Rolling Stone cover, student loan debt, online file sharing, and questions raised by social media.

Gain a strong understanding of the importance of business ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management from a strong managerial perspective with Carroll, Brown, and Buchholtz’s BUSINESS AND SOCIETY: ETHICS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT, 10E. You will discover, first-hand, how today’s most successful business decision makers both balance and protect the interests of various stakeholders, including investors, employees, consumers, the community, and the environment. You learn how strong business decisions making skills are particularly critical as businesses recover from a perilous financial period. You also examine the social, legal, political, and ethical responsibilities of a business to all external and internal groups that have a stake, or interest, in that business. In addition, BUSINESS AND SOCIETY: ETHICS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT, 10E is available with MindTap, an integrated text and online learning solution that enhances understanding of course content and offers opportunities to extend learning.

The stakeholder perspective is an alternative way of understanding how companies and people create value and trade with each other. Freeman, Harrison, and Zyglidopoulos discuss the foundation concepts and implementation of stakeholder management as well as the advantages this approach provides to firms and their managers. They present a number of tools that managers can use to implement stakeholder thinking, better understand stakeholders and create value with and for them. The Element concludes by discussing how managers can create stakeholder-oriented control systems and by examining some of the important stakeholder-related issues that are worthy of future scholarly and managerial attention.

The first question I would ask if I were in your shoes would be “Why should I spend my time reading what this guy has to say?” The answer is quite simple – because it’s always better to learn from someone else’s mistakes rather than from your own.
And while I’m now considered quite successful at dealing with complex stakeholder environments, it was not always the case – I did my fair share of mistakes in dealing with people involved in my projects, and learned from them. And hopefully, by reading what I discovered in the process you will be able to obtain the gain without feeling the pain.

Like many of you, I am what it’s called an “accidental project manager”. I started as a technical specialist, but rather soon I moved into team lead positions. To be effective I started to read about management and leadership, and I came across project management as a discipline – and I was hooked.

In my early years as a project manager, I could not understand why others are not performing as I am – especially that I never asked anyone else to do something that I wasn’t doing already. Not being a natural skill for me, it took a lot of time and effort to develop my emotional quotient and be able to understand and connect with the emotional side of the people.

Through work and conferences and social networking, I realized how many others are struggling with the same issues as I did, and tried to help. As a member of the Core Team for the Fifth Edition of PMI’s PMBOK® Guide, I was one of the advocates of separating the Stakeholders Management as a distinct Knowledge Area from Communications. Now, project managers reading it has at least an idea that they should pay attention to stakeholders, as they do for scope, budget, schedule, risk, quality, etc.

Stakeholder Engagement is (arguably) the most underestimated area of project management – and yet so decisive for achieving project success. Effectively engaging stakeholders can make or break a project – more than any methodology, tools, or techniques.

Good stakeholder engagement results in:
• Efficient communications, focused on project activities, with less time wasted in explanations.
• Introduced changes have a positive rather than negative impact on the project.
• Support and ownership are high and lead to easier acceptance and increased usage of deliverables.

For years I’ve been presenting at conferences my approach to obtaining appropriate stakeholders engagement in projects. That session evolved into a workshop, and finally in this book that I’m now sharing with you.

Working with people is both difficult and extremely rewarding – as long as it is performed within ethical boundaries, for the benefit of the project and not for personal gain. You will need to know and use a wide variety of tools and methods to really understand what makes them tick, and a wide range of interpersonal skills to interact with them.

The material includes a generic foundation, to make sure that key concepts are not missed, as well as my personal approach. Moreover, while primarily addressed to Project Managers, almost everything in this book is also applicable to any stakeholders for any type of endeavor – after all, they are people with interests that may or may not support your objectives and may or may not prevent you from obtaining them.

I also included examples to highlight issues and demonstrate concepts – as always, any similarities with real people or organizations are absolutely unintentional. While highly unlikely for anyone to truly know the real-life scenario that inspired my example, the facts and situations presented are so common that most likely occurred even in your personal experience.

With the latest changes to the PMP® exam, questions now focus more on concepts as applied to scenarios, even the ITTO based ones. This book, the 11th part of the 12-book series ‘Ace Your PMP® Exam’ focuses on the necessary concepts of Project Stakeholder Management Knowledge Area for PMP® exam based on PMBOK® 6th edition.

Please take a look at the Table of Content by clicking on the ‘Look Inside’ link to see the content is covered in the book.

Any process names and ITTOs are deliberately omitted from the book, except in places required in the context of the content, and the focus is only on simplifying concepts with examples and illustrations.

Master Your Stakeholder Management is a complementing study resource to a PMP® study guide.

In addition to using it as one of the study resources, many PMP® students are using this book series as a launchpad to their PMP exam preparation and also as a revision tool before the exam with good results.

Whether you are just getting started with your PMP® or CAPM® exam, or just about to take the test, now is the best time to get this book and get that edge required to pass the exam.

In any activity, an organization undertakes, whether strategic, operational or tactical, the activity can only be successful with the input, commitment, and support of its people – stakeholders. Gaining and maintaining the support and commitment of stakeholders requires a continuous process of engaging the right stakeholders at the right time and understanding and managing their expectations. Unfortunately, most organizations have difficulty implementing such culture change and need assistance and guidance to implement a consistent process for identification and management of stakeholders and their changing expectations. As a continuous improvement process, stakeholder management requires understanding and support from everyone in the organization from the CEO to the short-term contractor.

This requires the concepts and practices of effective stakeholder management to become embedded in the culture of the organization: ‘how we do things around here’, this book provides the ‘road map’ to help organizations achieve these objectives. The text has two specific purposes. Firstly, it is a ‘how-to’ book providing the fundamental processes and practices for improving stakeholder management in endeavors such as projects, and program management offices (PMO), it also gives guidance on organizational survival during mergers and acquisitions, preparing for the tender bidding, and marketing campaigns. Secondly, Lynda Bourne’s book is for organizations that have recognized the importance of stakeholder engagement to their success, it is a guidebook for assessing their current maturity regarding the implementation of stakeholder relationship management with a series of guidelines and milestones for achieving the preferred level of maturity.

Stakeholder theory is used for many purposes in a wide array of disciplines. It was intended to serve as a strategic management tool for business and society relationships in a capitalist system. While it has broad scholarly appeal, it is still somewhat controversial and is considered to be empirically underdeveloped. This new book offers a series of ten chapters from well-known, established, and emerging business and society scholars working with stakeholder theory in its many aspects. Each chapter is centered on a different sub-topic related to stakeholder management, written by the actually published experts on that sub-topic. The chapters stand alone as comprehensive pieces of scholarship in themselves, but they are intimately related and interwoven so as to give readers an overall sense of cohesion around the area of stakeholder management.

Strong stakeholder engagement is perhaps the most critical factor for achieving successful program execution in our fast-paced world. Many program managers get stuck in the “science” of program management, spending vast amounts of effort on tasks, charts, and metrics. Program managers who emphasize activities around relationship building and stakeholder engagement usually have the best chance for program success. This book focuses on how to engage your stakeholders in the right way, and keep them engaged throughout the course of your program.

The first section of the book covers stakeholder engagement in the program definition phase, including how to identify key stakeholders, gain their trust, and build relationships through effective communication. The second section moves to the project execution phase. It explains how to drive stakeholder engagement through the use of performance metrics, effective meeting management, and informal program governance.

In the last section, the author explains how to keep stakeholders engaged through the program closure phase. This section covers the operational readiness review, including transition plans, new process documentation and training, new technology rollout, and cultural readiness assessment. It also provides best practices and tips for holding the post-launch review and lessons learned session. The book concludes with a case study of a fictitious company, followed by discussion questions that allow you to apply the knowledge you have gained in this book.

Carrying out a project as planned is not a guarantee of success. Projects may fail because project management does not take the requirements, wishes, and concerns of stakeholders sufficiently into account. Projects can only be successful through contributions from stakeholders. And it is the stakeholders that evaluate whether they find the project successful – an evaluation based on criteria that go beyond receiving the project deliverables. More often than not, the criteria are implicit and change during the project course. This is an enormous challenge for project managers. The route to better projects says Pernille Eskerod and Anna Lund Jepsen, lies in finding ways to improve project stakeholder management. To manage stakeholders effectively, you need to know your stakeholders, their behaviors, and attitudes towards the project. The authors give guidance on how to adopt an analytical and structured approach; how to document, store and retrieve your knowledge; how to plan your stakeholder interactions in advance; and how to make your plans explicit, at the very least internally. A well-conceived plan can prevent you from being carried away in the heat of the moment and help you spend your limited resources for stakeholder management in the best way. To make this plan, you need to agree on the objectives of your stakeholder strategy and ways to achieve them. Project Stakeholder Management offers tactics and tools founded on established marketing communications theory as well as strategic management for doing just that. This book is part of Gower‘s Fundamentals of Project Management Series.