Stakeholders: from the Friedman-Freeman debate to the real work of managing them in creative projects

Stakeholders are the people, teams, organizations, or groups whose interests are affected by the decisions of a company or project, and who in turn can influence the outcome. The most precise translation into Spanish would be partes interesadas (interested parties), although the anglicism stakeholders has become established in professional usage. The difference between having a list of stakeholders and having seriously thought about them is usually the difference between projects that move forward and projects that get stuck in the final phase due to predictable blockers.

Before getting into practical management, it's worth situating the word. Although today it's used almost without reflection, the term carries a significant theoretical weight and an underlying intellectual debate that has defined much of strategic management since 1984.

The intellectual debate: Friedman vs. Freeman

In September 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". The thesis was clear: a company's only social responsibility is to maximize value for its shareholders within the rules of the game (legality, basic ethics). Anything else —dedicating resources to benefit employees, the community, or the environment beyond what improves shareholder return— was, for Friedman, an inappropriate deviation from the business's purpose.

That position —known as the shareholder primacy doctrine— dominated corporate thinking for decades and still influences much corporate governance legislation and practice, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Fourteen years later, in 1984, R. Edward Freeman published Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, the book that gave the concept its modern name and meaning. Freeman argued that Friedman's view was empirically incomplete: companies don't operate as isolated entities accountable only to shareholders; they operate within networks of relationships with multiple groups whose interests they affect and are affected by. Employees, customers, suppliers, communities, regulators, media — all are stakeholders whose support (or resistance) determines whether the company thrives over the long term.

The controversy between the two views —shareholder primacy vs. stakeholder theory— remains alive in academic management and boardrooms. But the balance has shifted significantly since roughly 2018. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock (the world's largest asset manager), has published annual letters to CEOs since 2018 arguing that companies must serve multiple stakeholders to create sustainable long-term value. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable —an association of the CEOs of the 200+ largest U.S. corporations— published a revised statement on the purpose of a corporation, explicitly abandoning shareholder primacy in favor of a multi-stakeholder model. It was a tectonic symbolic shift.

Knowing this debate exists isn't trivia. It changes how you interpret the work of managing stakeholders: it's not just the tactical coordination of people who can block a project. It's a practice that reflects a vision of what a company is.

Types of stakeholders in real projects

For a specific project —a product launch, a marketing campaign, an organizational transformation, a rebranding— stakeholders are typically categorized along two axes:

Internal vs. external. Internal stakeholders are people or teams within the organization: management, marketing, sales, product, operations, finance, legal, support. External ones are entities outside it: customers, end users, partners, suppliers, regulators, media, the community, investors. This distinction is operational because the communication channels and the degrees of control are completely different.

Primary vs. secondary. Primary stakeholders have a direct relationship with the company or project, and their support is necessary for it to move forward. Secondary ones can affect it indirectly — public opinion, sector media, professional associations. Confusing secondary stakeholders with primary ones leads to over-investing in managing stakeholders who contribute little.

Another dimension that's less formalized but critical in projects:

Decision-makers, executors, users, and blockers. In any project there's someone who formally decides (typically the sponsor), someone who does the work, someone who'll use the result, and someone who has the ability to block progress even without being in the formal decision line. The last group —potential blockers— is the most neglected. Legal arriving late, IT that has to grant access to a system, a team lead whose cooperation no one formally requested. Identifying blockers before they block is probably the most valuable skill in project management.

Mendelow's matrix: the most useful practical tool

In 1991, Aubrey Mendelow proposed a simple matrix that remains, thirty-five years later, the most widely used stakeholder management tool in companies. The matrix crosses two dimensions:

• Power / influence: how much capacity the stakeholder has to affect the project.
• Interest: how much the stakeholder cares about the outcome.

The result is four quadrants with distinct operational prescriptions:

High power, high interest → Manage closely. Frequent communication, involvement in key decisions, aligned expectations. Executive sponsors, key clients, leaders of directly affected departments.

High power, low interest → Keep satisfied. Periodic communication sufficient to avoid surprises. Don't flood them with operational details, but do make sure the final result doesn't displease them. These are usually non-sponsoring management, or areas like legal or compliance.

Low power, high interest → Keep informed. Newsletters, regular updates, transparency. Affected employees, users, communities of practice.

Low power, low interest → Monitor. Minimal oversight in case their level of interest or power changes. Don't invest active communication effort unless there's a signal.

The usefulness of the matrix isn't that classifying stakeholders is enough — it's that it forces a conscious decision about how much attention to give each one. The common trap without a matrix is communicating the same way with all stakeholders, which saturates some and neglects others.

The map almost no one does well

The practice of making a stakeholder map at the start of a project is widespread as a template and rare in substance. Most of the maps I see in companies are lists of titles and nothing more; they don't provide information that changes decisions. A useful map contains, for each relevant stakeholder:

• A specific name and role, not just an area. "Sales Director Juan García," not "Sales."
• What they expect from the project (stated and, if you know it, latent).
• What risk it poses to them or what worries them.
• Their current level of power and interest.
• Who their point of contact is on the project team.
• The agreed frequency and format of communication.

Without those elements, the map is organizational ritual. With them, it's an operational tool that's updated during the project as you learn.

When stakeholder management breaks down

Predictable failure patterns:

Communicating after deciding. Stakeholders who learn of decisions that affect them via a generic email —after they're already made— tend to react much worse than if they'd been consulted beforehand. Stakeholder management isn't after-the-fact communication; it's involvement in the process.

Identifying a blocker too late. Legal showing up the week before launch with compliance objections. IT saying the change requires infrastructure that wasn't planned for. The pattern repeats: the blocker isn't a blocker out of bad faith; they're a blocker because no one included them as a stakeholder in time.

Confusing the sponsor with the sole stakeholder. The project sponsor is important, but a good sponsor knows they need the active support of many others for the project to hold up after them. Treating the sponsor as the only relevant authority produces projects that advance while they pay attention and collapse when they get distracted.

Not updating the map. The project changes, the context changes, stakeholders change their level of interest. The map from six months ago is fiction if no one revises it.

Managing everyone the same. The inverse error of not classifying: investing the same communication effort in every stakeholder saturates some and neglects others. Mendelow's matrix exists precisely to avoid this.

Ignoring conflicts between stakeholders. Sometimes interests are incompatible. Sales wants to launch sooner; product wants to validate more. Legal wants guarantees; marketing wants flexibility. Pretending everyone is aligned when they aren't is hiding a problem that explodes later.

Stakeholders in creative operations

For a creative or marketing team running projects —campaigns, launches, rebrandings, productions— stakeholder management is half of the non-creative work. The pieces are designed; the projects are approved. When approval flows are ambiguous, when nobody knows who validates tone, when management steps in to review on the last day with fundamental changes, creative work gets redone for political rather than creative reasons.

That coordination belongs to the realm of creative operations: approval flows are, essentially, the formalization of the stakeholder map applied to content production — who approves what, in what order, with what criteria. The editorial calendar translates stakeholder expectations into delivery commitments. Brand management defines the principles on which creative work rests without having to renegotiate them with every new stakeholder on every new piece.

At Polimake that logic lives across three surfaces: Studio to coordinate stakeholders by project with owners and deadlines, Studio to produce with established criteria instead of re-litigating them, and Media as the repository where the project lives with all its context accessible — so that when a stakeholder asks about a decision made three months ago, the answer is documented and doesn't have to be reconstructed from memory.

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If you lead marketing, product, or transformation projects and you've arrived here looking for an answer about stakeholders, the most useful thing you can take from this article is probably the shift in mindset: stakeholder management isn't minor tactical coordination; it's the non-creative core of any project leader's work. The more complex the project, the more predictable it is that its success or failure will depend on well- or poorly managed stakeholders, not on the technical quality of the work.

To complement this, commercial research covers how to gather knowledge about external stakeholders (especially customers), persuasive communication covers how to build messages that move stakeholders in the direction the project needs, and persuasion covers the ethical discipline of doing that without manipulating.

Quick references

• Commercial research — for understanding external stakeholders.
• Persuasive communication — for building effective messages.
• Persuasion — the ethical and technical dimension of changing minds.
• Workflow — how stakeholder management translates into an operational process.
• Creative approval flows — its formalization in content production.