Oxford Seminar: The Stakeholder Engagement Imperative

No one expects deep sea oil rigs to blow up, accelerator pedals to stick or toxic ingredients to show up in baby milk formula, but they do. Those may be the most visible of issues but every major company can expect more demands to engage with a multitude of stakeholders over issues as diverse as the environment, accountability, consumer and  human rights, labour and supply chain  To name but a few.

Managing diverse stakeholder perceptions is critical to maintaining a positive corporate reputation and the strategic and financial reward of proactive stakeholder engagement is growing exponentially in this business cycle. Issues can quickly become flashpoints and unforeseen incidents can spiral badly in an atmosphere of declining levels of trust in business. With stakeholders on all sides eager to sound tough or gain some advantage this is creating a perfect storm of increased regulatory risk, increased media exposure and increased interest group pressure which has bottom line implications on reputational ‘good will’ and market share.
 
Terence Lyons, Managing Director of TSC The Stakeholder Company, will lead a session aimed at developing a better understanding of the challenges and new opportunities available to identify, manage and engage stakeholders.
 
This discussion will cover 3 areas:
 
The Challenges - or why most companies fail to manage stakeholders well. We will cover the issues of scale, new styles and internal organisation before looking at issue modelling and organizational response strategy. The goal: to shift corporations to proactive engagement, reaching across the stakeholder landscape to educate, inform, motivate, activate and build relationship capital before the crisis hits.
 
The Engine room - a review of methodologies, techniques and best practice to define, find, collect, organize and engage stakeholders nationally, regionally and globally. We will look at profiling and ranking models and the use of network theory to identify networks of amplifiers and key opinion leaders.
 
Finally we will try to decode the influence model, reviewing techniques, models and strategies to ‘mine’ and engage relationship networks via a consistent, proactive and interlocking ‘touch’ strategy.
 
Case studies will include Microsoft’s strategy to reengineer its corporate reputation in the wake of their US anti-trust scandal and EU legal issues, the palm oil crisis and how to stop the $15billion Papua New Guinea LNG project becoming the new Bougainville.
 

Terence Lyons is Managing Director of TSC, The Stakeholder Company. Based in Singapore he oversees the company’s global work supporting corporate reputations with cutting edge technology, data and consulting solutions.  He has 16 years experience in corporate communications and public affairs working across Asia, Europe and the U.S. Terence previously headed Microsoft’s global stakeholder engagement strategy and has worked with many Fortune 500 companies such as Nokia, Disney, HP and GSK to help them better manage their reputation and engagement programs. He holds a Bachelor of Laws from Murdoch University and is a graduate of various professional programs at the Kellogg School of Management and University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. He is admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.