Case 1: Maintaining Competitive Advantage or Being Upstaged by a Competitor?

Walmart has recently experienced at least two mass shootings at its stores. At the same time, Walmart serves roughly 20% of the market for ammunition sales in the US. Over 55,000 employees and customers have signed a petition requesting the end of gun and ammunition sales and have staged a walkout in protest. A year prior, after discovering that a mass shooter had purchased the assault rifle used in one deadly incident, Dicks Sporting Goods pulled assault rifles from the shelf and destroyed them, rather than reselling them. Walmart also stopped selling assault rifles at that time. Once again facing pressure, should Walmart stick to its guns?

Another evaluation that helps to contextualize a problem is a stakeholder analysis. Stakeholders are anyone impacted by a business (or project, or action, etc.). There is an array of typical stakeholders, and their impacts are not always equally significant:

At this stage of the project, it can be helpful to analyze which stakeholders are potentially impacted, how they might impact the project, and what their interests are. Evaluating in this way might help to reveal conflicts among those interests which might create tradeoffs that could constrain potential solutions. For instance, the quality that a customer seeks might reduce the return to investors, or providing additional benefits to employees might allow competitors to get ahead in the market.

In this step, it can also be helpful to identify particular departments within your organization that could potentially help or might be impacted by the issues related to this project. It may be necessary to get permissions or buy-in from them; you may need their help; or they may have solved similar problems in the past. A stakeholder analysis can help to humanize a problem rather than treating it as a strictly technical or numerical issue. Remember that real people with real needs are impacted helps to problem-solve mindfully.

1. Who are the people involved (different stakeholder groups)? What are their interests? Which business departments might help?