I just read a very thought-provoking article :  The 21st Century MBA – http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/08209?pg=3

According to this article my Stakeholder Reputation training seminar is not too far off with the prevalent thinking.

” For the MBA program at Washington State University (WSU), “Stakeholder-Focused Leadership for Sustained Business Success,” launched in the fall of 2007, the curriculum’s designers spent three years talking with alumni, business leaders, students, and faculty to gather data, test hypotheses, and evaluate their progress.

Unlike Yale, the school has preserved most of its traditional MBA courses, but has revised each course syllabus to incorporate the views of an organization’s stakeholders and to build on the idea that the core of any firm’s purpose is long-term sustainability, which the school describes as “the process of balancing stakeholder expectations with the strategic plan to achieve the optimal resource mix for long-run performance.”

WSU faculty determined that any effort to integrate a stakeholder orientation into business practice required a rigorous, relevant, and responsible methodology for managing the inevitable trade-off decisions that arise once a company moves beyond the single goal of shareholder value maximization.

They developed stakeholder-focused learning objectives for each of the required courses in the WSU curriculum. These objectives include identifying an organization’s resource needs and the stakeholders who supply or control those resources; the organization’s potential impacts on those stakeholders; and, most importantly, a model for understanding how the organization’s strategy would influence stakeholder relationships and, thus, resource availability.

In every course, students talk explicitly about the ways in which a corporate strategy can succeed in the marketplace and still satisfy the needs of a variety of critical people, including investors, employees, and customers, precisely because it recognizes these groups as resources.

This last sentence I do address in my seminars by using the Clarkson Universal Stakeholder principles. These principles were developed over a 12 year period at 4 multi-national future search type conferences.

Reading this article again just emphasised that I am in touch with latest thinking.

Cool!