The People We Surveyed
Thunderbird’s most admired company survey interviewed 352 global executives across all the demographic variables. The only constant was business acumen.
America is at a crossroads and so is the world, according to Thunderbird’s Most Admired Companies survey. We disagree fundamentally on most things.
It is up to the business community to find a way to bridge these gaps if the engine of commerce will continue to drive our economies.
Our goal was not the solving of the world’s problems (we leave that to the political science department at ASU, which assures us they are close to a solution). It was merely to find better data on how the differences manifest themselves in terms of business admiration, and therefore, how willing society will be to give innovation the room to make new things happen.
This journey of discovery began with finding a survey sample that had the business savvy and company smarts to provide us with not just intelligent answers, but business intelligence.
WHAT WERE THE RESPONDENT DEMOGRAPHICS AND HOW DID YOU OBTAIN THEM?
- The survey was went to a sample of Thunderbird’s 50,000 alum community. The specific sample be selected had the following characteristics:
- Global: — business experience in 27 countries and regions
- Sectors: 13 economic activities
- Graduate degrees in business
- 74% male; 26% female
- Age: 25–34 (8%); 35–44 (12%); 45–53 (35%); 55–64 (28%); 64+ (18%)
- Work experience:
COMPANY UNIVERSE
Where did you get the companies in the survey? The company universe was taken from the Forbes Global 500 list and seven other independent databases* reflecting key admiration qualities of performance, community, employee satisfaction, and brand recognition:
- — 2017 Newsweek Green Rankings
- — 2017 Harvard Biz Review Best-Performing CEOs
- — 2017 Global RepTrak Most Reputable Companies
- — 2017 Interbrand Best Global Brands
- — PWC Top 100 by Market Cap Increase From 2009 to 2017
- — 2017 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient Ratings
- — Top “unicorn” companies in technology
