Stakeholder Value as an Organizing Principle for Strategic Planning

Abstract This article describes an approach to introducing strategic planning to an enterprise, motivated by a primary focus on creating value for key stakeholders of the enterprise. Two key consequences of the approach are that the efforts of the enterprise are aligned in a coherent fashion to achieve targeted external stakeholder impact and that successful deployment of the strategic plan can be assessed explicitly in terms of external stakeholder value. The approach, which was developed initially in the context of strategic planning for professional societies, has been adopted in introducing strategic planning to university departments and would appear to have more general applicability to commercial enterprises.