The book that started a revolution (so to speak!), this is the basis of the stakeholder approach to strategic management. Freeman's style is fairly readable and it is not too difficult to work through, although it is heavy on the theory and background to the concept.
Some things are just obvious. They are just the way that things have always been – except that they’re not. To me, the idea that you’d manage to your stakeholders seems like it should be the thing that has always been done, but I realized that it hasn’t always been that way. So it was time to take a look back at when the idea of managing to stakeholders was new and different. That meant reading Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach.