In Their Time

[APPENDIX]

Methodology

The candidates included in our pool of one thousand business executives had to have been a founder or chief executive officer (CEO) of a U.S.-based company for at least five years, between 1900 and 2000. As such, any CEO whose tenure began after 1996 was automatically excluded from this survey. At the other end of the century, we included individuals whose tenures began before 1900 if they held the CEO or top company official position for at least five years in the first decade. For the earlier decades of the twentieth century, we drew on the work of Richard S. Tedlow, Courtney Purrington, and Kim Eric Bettcher. In their working paper, The American CEO in the Twentieth Century: Demography and Career Path, they chronicle ...