Turn a list of stakeholders into a decision that works for all of them. Build the professional judgement to apply this capability confidently in consequential management and leadership decisions.
Meet the course lead and explore the practical focus, learning experience, and professional value of this course.
Enroll in this course →Almost anyone can name the parties a decision affects. The hard part comes next: deciding which of them should shape a specific choice, and then turning that judgment into a strategy that creates value across groups rather than buying one group’s agreement with another’s loss. That step—from listing stakeholders to creating value for them—is where most stakeholder thinking stalls, and it is the whole subject of this course.
The gap is in the doing. Stakeholder analysis in practice becomes a list of names with a power-or-interest label attached: no view of what each party actually wants beneath its stated position, no reading of whose claim carries weight and why, and no strategy that follows. An analysis in that form cannot be defended in a board paper, and it cannot support a decision about a closure, a launch, a restructuring or a change of policy.
This course closes that gap by making you produce the artifact. Each lesson explains one tool and the judgment it supports, shows it worked through on a running case—Meridian Foods, a company weighing whether to close an aging plant and re-source—then hands the work to you on a decision of your own, with a model answer and a rubric to check yourself against. The second module assembles the analysis into a defended recommendation that creates sustainable value across the whole stakeholder set.
Most courses teach you to name and rank stakeholders. This one takes the harder step: turning stakeholder analysis into a defensible strategic decision that creates durable value across the full affected set. You work with a real decision, trace positions back to underlying interests, test influence and salience, and produce a recommendation you can explain to every party it affects.
You bring a real decision — your own, carried alongside a running case — and every lesson applies to it. Across the two weeks you build a stakeholder map, an interest inventory, an influence analysis and, finally, a defended recommendation. The output is not a certificate of attendance but a decision you actually need to make, made well.
The pivot of the whole method is separating what a party demands from what it actually needs, because value is created by serving interests, not by conceding to positions. Every lesson works the specific tools — the power–interest matrix, the power/legitimacy/urgency salience model — against a documented case, and the analysis quality standard your work is measured against is published in the first lesson, so the standard is visible from the start.
Most stakeholder training stops at balancing competing claims. This course teaches the harder and more useful move: finding the arrangements in which value for one group is value for others, and — where interests genuinely conflict — resolving them on defensible grounds of legitimacy, salience and fairness that you can state to the party who loses. Trading one group off against another is treated as the last resort, not the first.
Every MMI course includes a course-specific interactive Practice Toolkit—original Monarch intellectual property developed by Monarch faculty to support its learning objectives. Use the toolkit to apply key concepts, practise professional judgement and produce work you can carry into practice.
Discover Monarch Practice Toolkits →You can name the stakeholders a specific decision affects, applying Freeman's definition in both directions, and justify each inclusion and each exclusion in a sentence You can separate primary from secondary stakeholders by structural dependence, and map the set so that concentrated exposure and possible coalitions become visible You can tell a stated position from the real interest beneath it, classify each stake as equity, economic or influencer, and record the interests you do not yet know
You will learn to identify and map the stakeholders affected by a specific decision, distinguish their stated positions from their underlying interests, and assess their influence through power–interest and salience analysis. You will then learn to combine these judgments into a traceable, decision-ready stakeholder dossier that clearly states the decision’s central tension.
You can distinguish the descriptive, instrumental and normative claims of Stakeholder Theory, and use all three together to reframe an apparent binary You can spot the separation fallacy in a decision, and test whether an apparent trade-off is really a value-creation opportunity in disguise You can apply the three moves — integrate interests, enlarge the value created, redesign the deal — to serve a joint interest before conceding a loss
You will learn to distinguish descriptive, instrumental and normative stakeholder claims, recognise false trade-offs, and develop options that integrate interests, enlarge value or redesign the deal. You will also learn to resolve genuine conflicts on defensible grounds, test whether an arrangement is durable, and produce a stakeholder value recommendation that can be explained to every affected party.
Dean of the School
Dr. Jeffrey Henderson is Dean of Monarch Business School and Professor of Business Ethics, with senior management and advisory experience across commercial real estate, finance, and professional services. His career includes leadership roles with Bentall Capital, Brookfield Properties, KPMG Canada, and other international organizations, involving projects exceeding $6 billion. He brings MMI participants an applied perspective on strategic judgement, ethical leadership, organizational responsibility, and the translation of management ideas into credible professional action.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
Meet the accomplished professionals who successfully completed their doctoral studies in 2025, bringing deep leadership experience and rigorous scholarship to Monarch Switzerland.
