It's worth bearing in mind that there are a lot of parties who are, in some fashion, a stakeholder. Stockholders, debt holders, employees, vendors, contractors,

It's worth bearing in mind that there are a lot of parties who are, in some fashion, a stakeholder. Stockholders, debt holders, employees, vendors, contractors, towns where offices are, environments, governments of various levels, etc. Many of the things that produce value for them will be in opposition to the things that produce value for other stakeholders (expanding in one town vs another vs environment, etc.). In theory, it's clearly the job of leadership to balance the needs of all stakeholders to maximize value for everyone. In practice, there's a lot of room to use stakeholder value as a cover for doing what leadership wants to do anyway. Almost everything leadership would want to do provides value to some stakeholder, after all... One of the few upsides to shareholder value capitalism is that it provides a clear metric. This can help reduce difficulties from the principal-agent problem in a way that a stakeholder approach may have more trouble with. Perhaps it's excessively cynical of me, but when CEOs talk about stakeholder value I hear powerful people looking to be less accountable.