The 360° Corporation : From Stakeholder Trade-Offs to Transformation

Kaplan (Univ. of Toronto, Canada) focuses on the need to understand the broad set of stakeholders circling 360 degrees around a business. Stakeholders can be stockholders, employees, communities, consumers, suppliers, the environment, advocates of corporate social responsibility, and many others. Corporations such as Walmart sometimes must make trade-offs between maintaining low prices and increasing employee pay. Kaplan labels how to handle the trade-offs through four modes of action. The first mode suggests corporations must know what trade-offs are available. The second focuses on rethinking the business model in terms of win-win rather that win-lose with trade-offs. The third discusses innovating with the help of the stakeholders.The fourth focuses on how to thrive with irreconcilable trade-offs. The book includes many examples from Walmart and Nike. References tend to be from non-academic news reports and commentaries. The content of this book is remarkably similar to Tim Hatcher’s Ethics and HRD: A New Approach to Leading Responsible Organizations (CH, Jan'03, 40-2883), in which he discusses balancing stakeholder’s interests in choosing between profits and doing the right thing.