The definitive stakeholder framework for digital transformation programmes.
Digital transformation fails at the human layer. Misread a critical stakeholder, mismanage a coalition of resistors, or fail to engage a silent power broker, and even the most technically sound programme will stall. Habitats of Power provides the conceptual tools and practical protocols to prevent that outcome.
Robert Salter draws on Freeman's foundational stakeholder theory, Mitchell, Agle and Wood's salience model, and a practitioner career spanning regulated industries to construct a framework that is simultaneously academically rigorous and operationally immediate. The book is structured in three sections that move from theory to instrument to application.
Section 1: The Framework establishes the discipline across ten chapters covering the foundations of stakeholder theory, identification protocols, network mapping, engagement design, power and legitimacy analysis, communications strategy, coaching and capability building, conflict management, measurement, and the specific demands of the digital transformation context. Every claim is footnoted; every framework is comparative; every chapter closes with a transferable practitioner protocol.
Section 2: The Classical Bestiary introduces fourteen animal personas derived from observed behaviour in complex programmes. Each persona is anchored in named behavioural theory, mapped to French and Raven's bases of social power, calibrated against Kahneman's dual-process framework, and accompanied by a worked engagement protocol and a misidentification note. The Lion, the Bear, the Wolf, the Owl, the Elephant, the Monkey, the Rhino and seven further personas give programme teams a precise, shared vocabulary for conversations that are otherwise conducted in euphemism or frustration.
Section 3: The Digital Bestiary maps eight new personas unique to the digital transformation environment: the Octopus, the Chameleon, the Meerkat, the Beaver, the Hyena, the Cuckoo, the Hermit Crab, and the Raven. These are stakeholder behaviours that the existing literature has not adequately named, observed by practitioners but without a framework through which to address them.
Who this book is for
This is a book for senior practitioners: programme directors managing complex stakeholder ecosystems in regulated industries; executives responsible for transformation portfolios where political risk is as significant as delivery risk; doctoral researchers requiring a comprehensive, referenced treatment of stakeholder theory as it applies to organisational change; and consultants who need both the intellectual architecture and the practical instruments to advise at board level.
It is positioned alongside Bourne's Stakeholder Relationship Management, Bryson's Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, and Kotter's Leading Change, not as a replacement for those works but as the text that bridges between their theoretical ambitions and the daily reality of a digital programme.
What you will take from this book
A complete stakeholder identification and prioritisation system grounded in published theory. A network mapping methodology applicable to programmes of any scale. A communications and engagement framework calibrated to the political complexity of transformation. A behavioural vocabulary, the Bestiary, that makes difficult stakeholder conversations precise, professional, and productive. A measurement framework that moves stakeholder engagement from assertion to evidence.
The habitat shapes the animal. Understanding the habitat is the work.
