Stakeholder

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Fellow bureaucrats. More particularly, other people in and around the organisation who are paid to care less.

The word for that sensation you get when you reflect that, in an organization as full-bloodedly committed as an investment bank to the precepts of free market capitalism — that imaginary world in which there is no such thing as bureaucracy — is controlled, managed and populated by individuals whose main function is to devise and oversee the completion of bureaucratic functions — that word is irony.

In our crazy, young, snowflake-covered world, “stakeholders” are those whose interests the executive takes a sudden, intense interest in advancing, by way of explaining, in the annual report, why it has signally failed those whose money it is meant to be looking after.

See also

• Stakeholder capitalism