Mind Tools for Managers

AppendixSurvey Methodology

More than 15,000 managers across the world contributed to this book. They provided us with their views on the most important tools and techniques in each area of management, and this helped us to make the final selection of tools that appear in it. This appendix provides some additional information on the methodology we used.

The first step was to draw up a long list of tools. The MindTools.com website lists more than 1,000 tools, frameworks, and concepts, so this was our starting point. As we began to categorize the tools, the three concentric circles (manage yourself, manage others, manage the wider context) emerged as a simple organizing framework, and each circle was then further broken down into coherent elements, giving us the 18 chapters that constitute the book.

For each chapter, we put together a long list of 10 to 12 tools, based on our own judgment and analysis, as well as their popularity on the MindTools.com website. For the online survey, we asked respondents to identity the top five most important tools from this list. This was an important point in our survey design. We could have asked respondents to evaluate each tool on a 1–7 scale, but this approach typically leads to similar ratings across the board (i.e. all the tools are deemed important). Our design was a way to force people to make choices – to say that tool X is more important than tool Y.

The sample of managers we sent the survey to were users of MindTools.com. The full-length ...