The official org chart — reporting lines — has little to do with how decisions and power actually flow through an organization. McCarthy and Appel describe the real, informal structure of influence as "the Matrix": a network of "Power Players" (people whose backing actually moves decisions) and "CEO Whisperers" (people with informal, high-trust access to the top of the org, regardless of title). Effective stakeholder management means mapping this real structure and building relationships within it, not just following the reporting-line hierarchy.
Quote: "ignore that, just put it in the trash — it's got nothing to do with how decisions really get made or how power is distributed throughout the organization" (referring to the org chart).
Related to Company's Dominant Function (Sales / Marketing / Engineering / Finance-Driven) (which function's power players matter most).
The people who populate the Matrix — who can kill or fund an initiative regardless of their formal title — are termed Power Players in Bruce McCarthy & Melissa Appel's Align. The Stakeholder Canvas tool is built around identifying and classifying exactly this set of people, in place of a formal org chart.
Bruce McCarthy assumed his e-commerce employer was engineering-led because he sat among hundreds of engineers. The real power center was sales — visible only through indirect clues once he knew to look: only sales gave out cross-departmental awards, only sales could hire during a company-wide hiring freeze, and the CEO's daily coffee ritual was with the head of sales operations, not with any engineering leader. None of this showed up on the org chart; all of it showed up in who could get things done. From Align (McCarthy & Appel). See also Company's Dominant Function (Sales / Marketing / Engineering / Finance-Driven).
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust