View From the Top: An Inside Look at How People in Power See and Shape the World

Appendix

The PLATINUM Study (Public Leaders in America Today and the Inquiry into their Networks, Upbringings, and Motivations) is a 10-year comprehensive examination of public leadership at the highest levels of American society. Drawing on social-scientific analyses, the multiyear project explores how leaders influence their organizations, communities, and society as a whole. Five hundred and fifty leaders participated in the study, including two former presidents of the United States, 80 U.S. cabinet secretaries, dozens of senior White House officials across nine administrations, over 200 chief executive officers (including the CEOs of 20 percent of the Fortune 100), dozens of celebrated artists, performers, and writers, and over 100 top leaders from the nonprofit sector. The PLATINUM Study has amassed the largest and most exhaustive set of interview data conducted with leaders in every sector of society.

I learned through my earlier research to value the interviews of previous occupants of elite positions, especially when they are suggested multiple times through the reputational method of informant selection. The data are the richer because of this flexibility, because the reputational method—coupled with positional selection—allowed for the inclusion of former presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. Such flexibility allowed for comparisons over time, grouping elites from the same generation to test for similarities of responses and accounts of power among those who ...