How do I manage competing priorities in a matrix?

Competing priorities in a matrix are not a time management problem. They are a negotiation problem, and most leaders reach for the wrong tools.

I was coaching a programme manager leading a digital transformation across multiple business units in a global manufacturing company. She was ten months into an eighteen month programme and had, by any measure, done the relationship work well. Her stakeholder map was detailed. Her sponsor relationships were strong. Her cross-functional steering group functioned properly.

Then two things happened in the same week. Her finance sponsor needed her for a critical budget review that could not move. Her operations lead had escalated a resource conflict threatening a milestone the whole programme depended on. Both were legitimate. Both were time sensitive. Both came from different parts of the hierarchy. There was nobody above her who had authority over both.

She did what most matrix leaders do. She said yes to both, worked through several evenings, delivered both pieces of work at reduced quality, and by the end of the week had satisfied nobody. The budget review needed more preparation than it got. The resource conflict was partially resolved but not fully. Two weeks later, both issues resurfaced.

The problem was not her effort. The problem was that she had treated a negotiation problem as a scheduling problem. And underneath that, there was a structural problem she had never addressed at the start of the programme: she had never explicitly agreed with either stakeholder what would happen when competing demands arrived, because she had assumed they would not, or that she would manage them when they did.

Competing priorities are not a time management problem

Consider two senior project leads in a financial services firm facing the same situation. Two stakeholders from different functions both need a significant piece of their time in the same fortnight. The demands are incompatible. Both stakeholders believe their need is the more urgent.

The first project lead treats it as a diary problem. She splits her time, attends both sets of meetings, delegates what she can, and produces work of reduced quality for both. She has technically kept both commitments. She has not served either stakeholder well, and both know it. Worse, neither knows the other was competing for the same resource, so both feel privately let down without understanding why.

The second project lead treats it as a negotiation problem. She goes back to each stakeholder separately, surfaces the conflict explicitly, and asks a different question from “can you move your deadline.” She asks what they actually need to accomplish, not just what they asked her for. She discovers that one stakeholder’s real need is a clear recommendation and a decision, not her attendance at a series of meetings. She produces the recommendation in a focused half day and gives the other stakeholder full attention for the rest of the fortnight. Both are satisfied. Neither was misled about the conflict.

Same fortnight. Same competing demands. The difference is not efficiency. It is the willingness to name the conflict and negotiate the underlying need rather than absorbing the surface request.

This is the shift that most advice on matrix prioritisation misses. It addresses the problem as though it were a question of better planning, stronger boundaries, or the courage to say no. These things matter, but they treat competing priorities as a personal management problem. In a matrix, competing priorities are a relational and structural problem. The people making competing demands on your time and resources are not unreasonable. They have legitimate claims, different hierarchies, and no visibility of each other’s demands. Managing this well requires a different set of tools from a better calendar or a more disciplined inbox.

This article is a deep dive on competing priorities, the first of the practical challenge articles that follow the four-capability deep dives in this series. The foundation article, How do successful leaders create commitment in matrix organisations?, introduced the full framework. The series also covers what a matrix organisation is and why companies adopt one, how to build influence without authority, how to build a powerful internal network, how to convene people who don’t report to you, how to create accountability without authority, and how decisions get made in a matrix organisation.

Why competing priorities are so hard to manage in a matrix

Saying yes to everything as a default: Matrix leaders without formal authority often feel they cannot say no, because their ability to get things done depends on the relationships they are being asked to compromise. The result is a pattern of absorbing every demand, delivering none of them well, and eroding the trust that the yes was intended to protect.

Managing the queue rather than the portfolio: Each competing demand is treated as a separate item to be scheduled rather than as part of a system of commitments that interact with each other. Every individual commitment looks manageable in isolation. The aggregate is impossible, and the impossibility only becomes visible at the point of failure.

Defaulting to whoever shouts loudest: Without a principled basis for prioritisation, the default is whoever applies the most pressure. This is neither fair nor strategically sound. The stakeholder who shouts loudest is not necessarily the one whose claim is most legitimate, most consequential, or most time critical.

Resolving conflicts privately rather than naming them: Most matrix leaders try to manage competing priority conflicts without telling the stakeholders involved that a conflict exists. Each stakeholder believes they have full commitment when they do not. The leader absorbs the tension alone, and when something slips, both stakeholders feel let down without understanding the structural reason why.

Treating all demands as equally urgent and equally important: Without a way of distinguishing between demands that genuinely require immediate attention and those that feel urgent because someone said so, everything lands with the same apparent weight. The work that matters most does not always make the most noise.

Escalating every conflict upward: The alternative to absorbing the conflict is passing it up the hierarchy. This works in a vertical structure where a single manager has authority over all the competing demands. In a matrix, competing demands often come from different hierarchies. Escalating produces delay, damages relationships, and frequently returns the same unresolved conflict two weeks later.

Assuming rather than agreeing: The deepest failure mode of all is not reactive but structural. Most competing priority conflicts are foreseeable in their general shape even when their specific timing is not. A cross-functional programme will produce budget conflicts and resource conflicts. A matrix role will generate competing claims on the same specialist. A multi-stakeholder initiative will eventually ask two people to make incompatible demands on the same window of time. The leaders who manage competing priorities best do not simply respond better when they arrive. They have already agreed, with each key stakeholder, what will happen when they do.

Six practices for managing competing priorities in a matrix

See your commitments as a portfolio, not a queue

Most matrix leaders manage their commitments one at a time: the most recent request, the most urgent email, the loudest voice. This works well enough when demands arrive in a tidy sequence. It fails when multiple legitimate demands compete simultaneously, because there is no way to assess a new demand without understanding the full load it is joining.

A portfolio view means seeing all your active commitments together as a system, understanding their combined demand on your capacity, and identifying where they conflict before the conflict becomes a crisis. It is not a sophisticated planning tool. It is a simple discipline: at least once a week, lay out every commitment you have made, to whom, by when, and what it requires from you, and look at them together rather than one at a time.

A project director leading an enterprise resource planning rollout across twelve countries described the moment she made this shift. She had been managing her commitments through her inbox and her calendar, which meant she could see what was coming next but never what was coming all at once. When she mapped everything out together for the first time, she found she had made fourteen significant commitments across six stakeholders in the same six-week window, four of which required her to be in different locations on the same days. None of the individual commitments had seemed unreasonable when she made them. Together they were not deliverable.

The programme manager in the global manufacturing business found something similar. She had been saying yes to demands as they arrived, assessing each against the space in her diary rather than against the full weight of everything she had already committed to. When she mapped the portfolio, the conflict that had surfaced in her crisis week had been visible in the data for six weeks. She had simply never looked at the data that way.

Questions you can use to build a portfolio view of your commitments:

• If you listed every significant commitment you have made in the next eight weeks, to whom, and what it requires, would you be comfortable showing that list to all the stakeholders on it simultaneously?
• Where two or more commitments make demands on the same resource at the same point, which one have you actually prioritised?
• Which commitments on your list are the result of someone asking and you not wanting to say no, rather than a genuine assessment of what you have capacity to deliver?
• What is currently invisible to the people competing for your time because you are managing their demands separately rather than as a whole?
• If you had to remove one commitment from the next six weeks, which would it be, and what does that tell you about how you are currently allocating your capacity?

Practical actions:

• Once a week, produce a single view of all active commitments: who holds the commitment, what it requires, and when. Do this before responding to any new significant request, not after.
• When a new request arrives, assess it against the existing portfolio before accepting it. “I can do this” is not the same as “I can do this without reducing something else.”
• Where two commitments compete for the same resource at the same time, name the conflict to both stakeholders before it becomes a missed deadline, not after. The earlier you surface it, the more options you have.
• Review the portfolio at every major milestone and ask whether the commitments you made at the start of the period still reflect the priorities of the work, or whether the portfolio has drifted from what matters most.

Prioritise by salience, not volume or persistence

Not all competing demands deserve equal attention. The problem is that in a matrix, there is no formal hierarchy to tell you which demand outranks another, so leaders often default to effort: whoever asked most recently, whoever followed up most persistently, or whoever feels most senior in the room. None of these is a reliable guide to which demand actually matters most.

A more rigorous approach is to assess each demand against three questions. Does this stakeholder have real power over my ability to deliver, not just the authority to make requests, but the practical ability to enable or block what I am trying to accomplish? Is their claim on my time legitimate given what has actually been agreed, or are they asking for more than the relationship or the brief supports? And is the urgency genuine, meaning the consequence of delay is real and time specific, or is it created pressure, someone moving a deadline forward because they would prefer things sooner?

A stakeholder who scores highly on all three deserves immediate attention. A stakeholder who scores on only one does not necessarily deserve less respect, but they deserve a different response from the same level of immediate resource. This gives a principled basis for prioritisation that does not depend on gut feel, seniority, or who made the most noise.

A business change manager leading a post-merger integration across two European healthcare businesses used this approach to navigate a situation where three senior stakeholders were simultaneously claiming urgent attention. She worked through each of them against the same three questions. The first had genuine power over her programme’s resourcing, a legitimate claim within the agreed scope, and a real external deadline tied to a regulatory submission. The second had legitimacy and genuine urgency but limited practical power over her work. The third had seniority and power but a claim that was not clearly within what had been agreed, and a deadline that turned out on examination to be a preference rather than a constraint. She gave the first full attention immediately, managed the second through a structured written update rather than a meeting, and had a direct conversation with the third about scope before committing any time at all.

The programme manager applied the same discipline. Her finance sponsor’s budget review had power, legitimacy, and genuine time pressure because the group budget cycle had a fixed external deadline. Her operations lead’s resource conflict had legitimacy and urgency but the power dimension was more limited in practice. She did not ignore either. But she was able to sequence her response in a way she had not managed before, because she had a principled basis for the choice that went beyond who had asked most recently.

Questions you can use to assess the true salience of a competing demand:

• Does this stakeholder have practical power over my ability to deliver, or do they simply have authority to make requests?
• Is this request within the scope of what has genuinely been agreed, or are they asking for more than the brief supports?
• Is the urgency here real and externally determined, or is it created pressure that could be renegotiated?
• If I deprioritised this demand for two weeks, what would the actual consequence be, and who would feel it?
• Am I treating this demand as urgent because it is urgent, or because the person asking makes it feel that way?

Practical actions:

• For any significant competing demand, assess it against power, legitimacy, and urgency before deciding how to respond. Write the assessment down rather than running it in your head.
• When a demand scores high on all three, act immediately. When it scores on one or two, match the response to the actual level of salience rather than the stated urgency.
• When a demand’s urgency appears self-imposed rather than externally driven, name this directly and early: “Help me understand the consequence if this moves by two weeks.” The answer usually clarifies whether the urgency is real.
• Review your salience assessments at regular intervals. Power, legitimacy, and urgency all shift over the course of a programme, and a stakeholder who was low salience at the start may become high salience as circumstances change.

Negotiate the interest behind the request

When two demands compete for the same resource, the stated requests are usually incompatible. Both stakeholders need a piece of you in the same week. Both presentations need to go to the board in the same month. Both projects need the same specialist for the same two-week window. In each case, the surface level conflict looks unresolvable because the positions are incompatible.

What is usually not incompatible are the interests behind the positions. The finance sponsor who needs the budget review by Friday needs it by Friday because the group CFO is presenting on Monday. The actual interest is that the CFO has a credible set of numbers for Monday morning. That interest might be met by a direct briefing call, a prepared summary, or a revised set of slides rather than by a full budget review session. The interest and the stated request are not the same thing, and most matrix leaders never ask about one because they are too busy trying to respond to the other.

The discipline is to go back to each stakeholder separately, before you have decided how to respond, and ask what they are trying to accomplish rather than simply confirming what they asked for. This is not a way of avoiding the commitment. It is a way of finding the version of the commitment that actually serves the need, which is often considerably smaller than the version originally stated.

An internal consultant working inside a global technology company described a resource conflict where two programme leads both needed the same data architect for a six-week intensive sprint. Neither programme could move its timeline. Both leads had genuine delivery pressure and legitimate claims. She went back to each separately and asked what the data architect actually needed to produce in those six weeks, not what they needed him for in general. It emerged that one programme needed him full time for the first three weeks and barely at all thereafter. The other needed him lightly for the first three weeks and intensively for the final three. The conflict that had seemed irresolvable was not, once the actual need rather than the general allocation was on the table.

The programme manager used the same move with her finance sponsor. Rather than trying to find time for the full budget review, she asked what the sponsor needed to have in hand before the budget cycle closed. The answer was three specific numbers and a narrative for the CFO. She produced those in four hours and attended a thirty minute call. The sponsor was satisfied. The operations conflict got the attention it needed for the rest of the week.

Questions you can use to negotiate the interest behind the request:

• What are you trying to accomplish with this, and how does this request help you get there?
• If the specific thing you have asked for were not possible, what else would serve the same underlying need?
• Is there a version of this commitment that would meet your real need in less time, or at a different point in the process?
• What would happen if this came back to you as a recommendation rather than as a working session? Would the outcome be the same?
• If you had to name the one thing that absolutely has to happen here, what would it be?

Practical actions:

• Before responding to any competing demand, ask one question: what is this person trying to accomplish, and is that the same as what they have asked me for? Treat any gap between the two as a negotiating opportunity rather than a problem to solve by working harder.
• Go back to the stakeholder before you have committed, not after. “Before I confirm I can do this by Thursday, help me understand what you need it for” is a legitimate and professional response to any request.
• When you find the interest behind the position, offer the version of the commitment that serves the interest rather than the version that was originally stated, and explain why. Most stakeholders will accept a smaller ask if the reason for it is clear and the underlying need is genuinely met.
• Where two stakeholders are competing for the same resource, explore whether there is a sequencing, a shared output, or a different configuration that serves both interests without requiring the same person at the same time.

Surface trade-offs to the people competing, not just to yourself

The instinct when competing demands arrive is to solve the conflict privately. You assess the two demands, make a call, deliver what you can, and manage the fallout when something slips. This keeps the conflict off the agenda but means every trade-off you make is invisible to the people affected by it. Each stakeholder believes they have your full commitment when they do not, and each is making plans that depend on an assumption you are not able to honour.

A more effective approach is to make the conflict visible to the people creating it, not as an escalation or a complaint, but as useful information that changes what they can plan for. When two stakeholders are competing for the same resource, bringing the conflict into the open, ideally with both of them together, changes the dynamic from a problem you are absorbing alone to a problem the group can solve together.

This requires a specific kind of conversation: naming the conflict without apportioning blame, giving both stakeholders visibility of the full picture, and asking them to help determine the best resolution rather than simply announcing your decision. The accountability article in this series explored this from the slipping-commitment angle. Here the same discipline applies at the point of the competing demand rather than after it has produced a failure.

A transformation lead at a large professional services firm tried this for the first time when two of her functional sponsors both needed a piece of her team’s analytical capacity in the same two-week sprint. Both sponsors had genuine delivery pressure. Rather than deciding unilaterally and managing both separately, she brought them into a thirty-minute conversation and laid out the conflict directly: this is what each of you has asked for, this is the capacity available, and these are the options I can see. The conversation was slightly awkward for the first five minutes. By the end of it, the sponsors had agreed a sequencing between themselves that she would never have been able to impose from outside the relationship.

The programme manager had tried to resolve her crisis week bilaterally, managing each stakeholder separately and in confidence. When she reflected on it afterwards, the thing she had been most reluctant to do was to tell each stakeholder that they were competing with someone else for the same resource. She had worried it would feel like she was making excuses. In practice, the stakeholders involved had more goodwill and more flexibility than she had assumed. The conflict itself was not the problem. The invisibility of it was.

Questions you can use when surfacing a trade-off to the people creating it:

• What would each of the stakeholders involved know or decide differently if they could see the full picture of competing demands rather than just their own?
• Is the reason you are managing this conflict privately to protect the stakeholders, or to protect yourself from a conversation that feels uncomfortable?
• If both stakeholders were in the same room and could see each other’s demands, would they make the same requests in the same form?
• What is the earliest point at which you could surface this conflict, before any commitment has been missed or any deadline damaged?
• What would you need from each stakeholder to be able to have this conversation productively rather than defensively?

Practical actions:

• When two stakeholders are competing for the same resource, consider bringing them together to see the conflict directly before you attempt to resolve it unilaterally, not as an escalation, but as information sharing that enables a better solution.
• When you do surface a trade-off, name it in terms of the work and the options rather than in terms of which stakeholder is right and which is wrong. “Here is what we have, here is what has been asked for, and here are the options I can see” is a neutral and productive framing.
• If bringing stakeholders together is not possible, be explicit with each separately about the constraint: “I want to be transparent that I am managing a competing demand in the same window and here is how I am proposing to resolve it.” This is not an excuse. It is the kind of honesty that builds long-term trust.
• After any significant trade-off is resolved, tell both stakeholders what was decided and why. A trade-off made invisibly tends to resurface. One made explicitly, with the reasoning shared, tends to stay resolved.

Protect the work that only you can do

In a matrix, there is work that requires you specifically: the cross-boundary relationships, the influence conversations that depend on the trust you have built, the facilitation that only works because of your standing with the group. There is also work that looks important and feels urgent but could be delegated, deferred, or declined without material consequence to the things that matter most.

Most matrix leaders know this distinction in theory and struggle to apply it in practice, because the work that presents itself as most urgent is rarely the work that is most consequential. The stakeholder who needs a response today is visible. The relationship that needs tending before it becomes a problem is not. The meeting that is already in the diary crowds out the conversation that is not yet scheduled but matters more.

The discipline is to ask, for every significant demand on your time, whether this is work that requires you specifically, work that could be done by someone else with support and direction from you, or work that should not be done at all given what else is competing for the same capacity. This is not about working less. It is about protecting the capacity that makes the rest of your work possible, the relationship work, the influence work, the boundary-spanning work that cannot be delegated because it depends on who you are in the network rather than what you can produce.

A regional director leading market expansion across Southeast Asia found that roughly a third of her time was being spent on progress reporting, status updates, and internal briefing documents that she was producing herself because she had always produced them and nobody had ever suggested otherwise. When she mapped her portfolio and assessed each activity against whether it required her specifically, the reporting work moved to a programme coordinator within two weeks. The time it freed did not go to rest. It went to three stakeholder conversations she had been postponing for months because she never had the time: conversations that, once they happened, unblocked more progress than the reporting had ever enabled.

The programme manager, reflecting on her crisis week, identified three meetings she had attended that week that had not required her presence, only her preparation. A project manager could have attended with a brief. She had gone herself because it was easier than briefing someone and because attending felt like commitment. It was not commitment. It was substitution: replacing the work that only she could do with work that looked similar but was not.

Questions you can use to protect the capacity that only you can provide:

• Which of the things competing for your time this week could be done equally well, or well enough, by someone else with the right briefing?
• What is the work that only you can do, given your relationships, your standing in the network, and the trust you have built, and is that work actually getting enough of your time?
• Which meetings are you attending because your presence is required, and which are you attending because your absence would be noticed?
• If you removed yourself from one recurring commitment this month, what would actually stop or suffer, and is that a price worth paying for the capacity it would release?
• What are you postponing because you do not have time, and is any of it more important than the things currently filling that time?

Practical actions:

• For every significant recurring commitment, ask once a quarter whether it still requires you specifically or whether it could be handled by someone else with appropriate support. Treat any commitment that has been running unchanged for more than three months as a candidate for review.
• When a new request arrives that does not require you specifically, respond with a delegation rather than a deferral. “I am going to ask [name] to handle this with my full backing” is a more useful response than “I will get to this when I have time,” which usually means you will get to it badly, under pressure, at the last moment.
• Identify the two or three relationships that are most critical to your ability to deliver across the matrix and protect time for them as deliberately as you would protect time for a board presentation. Relationship maintenance is not softer than delivery. It is what makes delivery possible.
• Build a standing question into your weekly review: what am I about to spend time on this week that does not require me, and what am I not spending time on that does?

Contract for disruption before it arrives

The five practices above deal with competing priorities as they arise. This one addresses the conditions that generate them in the first place.

Most competing priority conflicts in a matrix are foreseeable in their general shape, even when their specific timing is not. A cross-functional programme will produce budget conflicts and resource conflicts. A matrix role will generate competing claims on the same specialist. A multi-stakeholder initiative will eventually ask two or more people to make incompatible demands on the same window of time. The leaders who manage competing priorities best do not simply respond better when they arrive. They have already agreed, with each key stakeholder, what will happen when they do.

This is the contracting discipline: an explicit conversation at the start of every significant work relationship that covers not just what you will deliver and by when, but how you will work together, what each of you needs from the other to make the relationship function, and specifically what will happen when priorities shift or competing demands create a conflict. The technical contract covers the work itself. The relational contract covers how you will handle difficulty, who contacts whom when something changes, and what each person’s non-negotiables are. Both matter, and assuming either is a reliable source of the conflicts this article has been exploring throughout.

A senior programme director I worked with, who was managing three concurrent programmes across an energy business, began every significant stakeholder relationship with a version of the same conversation. She called it a working agreement rather than a contract, because the word contract implied legal formality she did not want. The conversation covered four things: what she was committing to deliver and in what form, what she needed from the stakeholder to make that possible, how they would handle it if competing demands required her to reprioritise, and what the stakeholder needed from her in terms of communication style and frequency. The conversation took between thirty and sixty minutes and happened before any delivery began, not when a conflict had already emerged.

She described the single most useful element as the third question. Asking upfront “how do you want me to handle it when I have a genuine conflict between this work and another demand on my time” produced a range of responses she could not have predicted. One stakeholder said they wanted to be contacted immediately regardless of the hour. Another said they wanted a written note with two options and a recommendation, not a phone call. A third said that as long as nothing slipped by more than a week without warning, they were flexible about how it was managed. None of these conversations were difficult. All of them saved a difficult conversation later.

The programme manager reflected, after her crisis week, that neither the finance sponsor conflict nor the operations lead conflict had been genuinely unforeseeable. Any eighteen month cross-functional programme in a manufacturing business was going to produce budget pressure and resourcing conflicts. She had known that. She had simply never discussed it. If she had contracted with each stakeholder at the outset about how competing demands would be handled, week ten would have had a process rather than a crisis.

Questions you can use to establish a working contract with each key stakeholder:

• What are you committing to deliver, in what form, by when, and what does the other person need from you to make that possible?
• What does the other person need from the relationship itself, in terms of communication, access, and how concerns are raised, that has not been stated but is being assumed?
• How will you handle it, and who will contact whom, when a competing demand creates a genuine conflict with this commitment?
• What is each person’s non-negotiable in this relationship, the thing that, if it went unaddressed, would fundamentally damage trust?
• When is the right point to revisit this agreement, and how will you know if it needs updating?

Practical actions:

• At the start of every significant work relationship in a matrix, have an explicit contracting conversation that covers both the technical and relational dimensions, what will be delivered and how you will work together. Do not assume either.
• Build the disruption question into every contracting conversation before work begins: “When competing demands create a conflict with this commitment, which they will, how do you want me to handle it?” Write the answer down and treat it as part of the agreement.
• Where an existing significant relationship has never had this conversation, it is not too late to have it. Frame it as a working review rather than a correction: “I want to make sure we are aligned on how we handle the situations that will inevitably come up, before they do.”
• Revisit working agreements at major milestones, not just at the start. The conditions of a relationship change over the course of a long programme, and an agreement that worked at the beginning may need updating six months in.

Wrapping up

Competing priorities in a matrix are not primarily a problem of too much work and too little time, though they feel that way. They are a problem of too many legitimate claims, from people with different hierarchies and no visibility of each other, on a resource that cannot expand to meet all of them. Managing this well requires a clear view of the full portfolio of commitments, a principled basis for prioritisation, the skill of negotiating underlying interests rather than stated positions, the willingness to surface trade-offs rather than absorb them, the discipline to protect the work that only you can do, and the foresight to contract for disruption before it arrives rather than improvising when it does.

None of this eliminates the tension. Competing priorities are not a temporary problem to be solved and closed. They are a permanent feature of life in a matrix, where responsibility is diffuse and authority is not. What changes with practice is not the volume of competing demands but your ability to work with them in a way that is transparent to the people involved, sustainable for you, and more likely to produce the outcomes that actually matter.

Three questions for reflection

1. Think of the last time you said yes to a significant commitment and later regretted it. At the point you said yes, had you assessed it against everything else you had already committed to?
2. Is there a stakeholder who is currently receiving more of your attention than their power, legitimacy, and urgency genuinely justify, simply because they ask most persistently or most recently?
3. With your most important matrix relationships, have you ever explicitly agreed what will happen when competing demands create a conflict, or has that always been assumed?

Inspiration

Block, P. (2000) Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used. 2nd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Covey, S.R. (1989) The seven habits of highly effective people: Restoring the character ethic. New York: Free Press.

Fisher, R. and Ury, W. (1981) Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. London: Penguin.

Goldratt, E.M. and Cox, J. (1984) The goal: A process of ongoing improvement. Aldershot: Gower.

Martin, R. (2007) The opposable mind: How successful leaders win through integrative thinking. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Mitchell, R.K., Agle, B.R. and Wood, D.J. (1997) ‘Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts’, Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 853–886.