Lena's plan for Mill Lane: Lena and Marco want one central bakery on Mill Lane. Before a brick is laid, Lena needs to know who could stop it.
| The plan | Details |
|---|---|
| Now | Three shops, each baking its own bread in a cramped back room |
| The central bakery | One bakery on Mill Lane that bakes for all three shops through the night |
| Cost | $600,000, with $400,000 borrowed from the bank |
| Saving | About $90,000 a year |
| Hours | The ovens would start at 2 am and three vans would leave at 5 am |
In 1.4.1 you met the people and groups who affect a business or are affected by it (its stakeholders). Now ask two different questions about each of them.
How much does the decision matter to them? That is their interest.
How much can they do about it? That is their power: the ability to change what the business decides.
| Stakeholder | How much it matters to them | What they could do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Lena and Marco (shareholders) | Their company and their savings | Vote the plan through or vote it down: together they hold 83% of the shares |
| The bank | $400,000 of its money at risk | Refuse the loan, and there is no central bakery |
| The town council | One of dozens of planning applications this month | Refuse planning permission for the site |
| The six bakers | Their work moves to the middle of the night | Little on their own; far more if they refuse together |
| Mill Lane residents | Vans past their bedroom windows at 5 am | Almost nothing directly: they own no shares and sign no contracts |
Where power comes from: Power comes from holding something the business needs and could hold back: votes, money, permission, work, custom or supplies.
The shareholders have votes, the bank has money, the council has permission. The residents have none of these, which is why they care the most and can do the least.
So interest and power are different things. The people most affected by a decision are often the people with the least say over it.
A baker with a mortgage and no other bakery nearby cares about night shifts far more than the bank does. The bank can stop the whole plan with one letter; the baker, on his own, can only leave.
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Lena draws a grid on the back of an order form. Every stakeholder lands in one of four boxes (a power-interest grid, also called stakeholder mapping).
How the grid is drawn
- Across the top. How much the central bakery matters to each group.
- Down the side. How much each group could change it.
| Low interest | High interest | |
|---|---|---|
| High power | The town council: it can refuse the site, but the bakery is one application among dozens. Keep it satisfied: a tidy application, questions answered quickly. | Lena and Marco, and the bank lending $400,000. Work with them closely: nothing happens without them. |
| Low power | The flour mill: one larger order instead of three smaller ones, and little else changes. Keep an eye on it. | The Mill Lane residents and the bakers. Keep them informed: explain the plan before they hear it from someone else. |
What the grid is for: It tells Lena where to spend her time. The groups that can stop the plan need the most attention; the groups who will feel it most need to hear about it first.
It is a snapshot, not a ranking of who matters. A group with little power today can have a lot of it next month.
Power is not fixed. One baker who refuses night shifts can be replaced; all six refusing together cannot, because the ovens do not run without them. One resident's complaint is a letter; six hundred signatures on the council's desk the week before the planning vote is a problem.
Three ways a group moves up the grid
Act together
Six bakers speaking as one, or forty households signing one letter, can hold back what one person cannot. A group of employees organised for this is a trade union.
Win over someone with power
The residents cannot refuse the site. The council can. Persuade the council, and the residents' interest arrives with the council's power behind it.
Go public
A story in the local paper or a video on social media reaches the bakery's customers. Customers hold the one thing every business needs: the money they spend.
Judging a stakeholder's influence: Ask what the group could hold back, whether it acts alone or together, and whether it can win over someone who already has power. Those three answers place it on the grid.
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Quiet Mill Lane: Two weeks after the plan is announced, forty households on Mill Lane start a group called Quiet Mill Lane. Within a month, Lena is changing her plan.
Who Quiet Mill Lane is
- One aim. No delivery vans before 7 am.
- No link to the business. They own no shares, sell the bakery nothing and work for it not at all.
Quiet Mill Lane is a pressure group, which you met in 1.4.1: people who share a common interest and join together to influence the decisions an organization makes, from outside it. It is an external stakeholder.
Some pressure groups are local and last one campaign, like Quiet Mill Lane. Others are national or global and campaign for years, on the environment, animal welfare or working conditions. They do not want to run the business. They want it to decide differently.
How Quiet Mill Lane pushed
A petition to the council
Six hundred signatures, delivered the week before the planning vote. The council has the power the residents lack, so the group aims there (lobbying: persuading the people who make or apply the rules).
Going public
Videos of a test van at 5 am on the town's social media pages, then a story in the local paper. Every reader is a possible customer.
Asking customers to stay away
A call to buy bread somewhere else until the plan changes (a boycott). Sales at the High Street shop, the one nearest Mill Lane, fell by 4% in a month.
Talking to the owners
A letter to Lena and Marco with a plain offer: move the vans to 7 am and the group drops its objection.
Customers can press a business without any group at all. When a business does something they dislike, some simply stop buying, and others say so online, where thousands can read it. Both hit the same place: the revenue the business depends on.
Borrowed power: A pressure group rarely has power of its own. It borrows it from stakeholders who do: the council's permission, the customers' spending, the local paper's readers.
That is why its methods all point outward, at someone the business cannot ignore.
Lena moved the first van to 6.30 am, leased two electric vans that are almost silent, and opened a rear gate onto the ring road. The central bakery went ahead in a different shape.
That is what successful pressure usually looks like: not a cancelled decision, but a changed one.
The central bakery opens in March. Look at it now from each stakeholder's side, not Lena's.
Impact: What a decision changes for a group is its impact on that stakeholder. The same decision is good news for some groups, bad news for others, and often both for the same group.
| Stakeholder | Positive impact | Negative impact |
|---|---|---|
| Shareholders (Lena, Marco, Marco's cousin) | Costs fall by about $90,000 a year, so profit and dividends can rise | $400,000 of debt to repay, with interest, even in a bad year |
| Bakers | Two new jobs, and a modern bakery instead of three cramped back rooms | Work starts at 2 am instead of 5 am; two bakers with young children may leave |
| Customers | The same bread in every shop, on the shelf by 7 am, at the old price | Bread baked hours earlier across town, not in the back room that morning |
| Mill Lane residents | A few jobs within walking distance | Vans and ovens next to their homes from early morning |
| The bank | Interest earned on a $400,000 loan | The risk of not being repaid if the bakery struggles |
| The town council | Jobs and business taxes for the town | Complaints from voters on Mill Lane |
| The flour mill | One large regular order instead of three small ones | A bigger customer that can bargain harder on price |
Say who, then say what changes for them: An impact has two halves. Name the group. Then say what changes for that group and why it matters to them, with a number or a name from the case.
'Employees are affected' is only the first half. 'The bakers now start at 2 am, and two with young children may leave' is both.
Impacts also travel from one group to the next. If the vans had kept waking Mill Lane, the boycott would have grown; lower sales mean less profit for the shareholders and fewer hours for the shop staff.
A decision that hurts one group badly enough usually comes back to the business through another. It is the same reason a business caught behaving badly can lose customers, staff and investors all at once.
Now and later: Some impacts arrive on the first day: the night shifts, the vans, the loan. Others take a year to show: the savings, the steadier quality, the bakery's name in the town.
When you weigh a decision, ask who gains now and who gains later. The answers rarely match, which is why stakeholders so often disagree, as you saw in 1.4.2.
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How this comes up: Stakeholder pressure and impact come up in short questions of two and four marks.
The questions
- Explain one way in which stakeholders applied pressure, for two marks. A short passage describes stakeholders pushing back against a business.
- Define pressure group, for two marks.
- Explain how a decision could impact two stakeholder groups, for four marks. Two marks for each group.
The two-mark pattern
- Name the way. Say what the stakeholders did and how it presses on the business: customers bought less, so revenue fell.
- Show it in the case. Take a name or a number from the passage: sales at the High Street shop fell by 4% in a month.
- Stop at one. The question asks for one way. Make that one clear rather than listing three.
Two traps
- Who, not how. 'Customers were unhappy' names a stakeholder and a feeling. It does not say what they did. Pressure is an action: stopped buying, complained online, signed a petition, voted against.
- No case, no second mark. 'Customers can boycott a business' is one mark. 'Customers of the High Street shop stopped buying, and its sales fell by 4%' is two.
Explain one way in which stakeholders applied pressure on Lena's Bakery.
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