Stakeholder Influences on Programs

Stakeholders can be defined as all entities that are impacted through a business running its operations and conducting other activities related to its existence. The impact can be direct in the case of the business's customers and suppliers or indirect in the case of the communities in which the business chooses to place its locations. Businesses must consider the needs and expectations of its stakeholders, though it need not consider them to be of equal importance. Certain stakeholders such as owners and investors are more important than others (Li, n.d.). Once the business has identified its stakeholders and their importance to the business, it can begin to plan based on their needs and expectations. Each stakeholder has concerns that it expects to be met by the business. For example, the business's owners expect it to be profitable and to distribute that profit to them while local and federal government agencies expect it to obey the law and pay its taxes on time. The importance of each stakeholder to the business determines the degree to which the business attempts to accommodate the stakeholder in the course of planning its actions. The impact of stakeholder needs and expectations on businesses is inescapable and ubiquitous (Li, n.d.). Businesses exist to meet the expectations of one specific stakeholder in the sense that businesses are set up and operated to produce profit for their owners and investors. Businesses also must consider the needs and expectations of other stakeholders because of their ability to help and hinder their operations. For example, a business should be considerate of its host communities because that improves its reputation and strengthens its market presence. On the other hand, if the business chooses to ignore its host communities, that disregard becomes a black mark on its reputation and can result in other sanctions if relations become bad enough. The only stakeholders that businesses can ignore are the ones with little interest