As a corporate manager of a publicly held company, one is responsible for the interests of many different stakeholders. In the past, it has been a very common assumption and practice that corporate managers of a company should strive to act solely for the benefit of shareholders, or owners of the company. Corporate managers were trained to take any actions necessary or use any means possible to improve the bottom line; or profits, without regard to other stakeholders. As a business student at San Diego State, I had adopted this same bottom line philosophy that had been preached to me since the day of my first business class. I had bought into these teachings so wholeheartedly, that before this class I really felt the terms stakeholder and shareholder could be used interchangeably. However, I was very enlightened by your lecture on February 29th, in which, you taught us the true definition of a stakeholder. It simply boils down to two crucial yet basic points. A stakeholder is described as, anyone or anything that can affect the ability of the corporation to achieve its mission or which is affected by the corporations activities (Dunn, 2/29 Lecture). This simple statement encompasses so many more entities than I had ever thought of in the past. In this paper I will place myself in the position of a corporate manager of a publicly held, for profit, company and discuss which shareholders interests a corporate manager is obligated to represent in the order of their importance. As a corporate manager, my primary obligation is to shareholders. As you will see later in this paper, these are not the only stakeholders whose interests should be represented but they are the most important. Without financing from shareholders, no corporation can efficiently accomplish their mission and goals. In a for-profit organization, the shareholders are the people that made the inception of the corporation possible. They bare all of the risk and put their f...
