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 survey would have taken about 40 minutes to complete, so we split it into thirds. Some people got one set of questions; others got the other sets. In total, we sent the survey to approximately 850,000 people, and we received 15,242 responses. Table A.1 provides a rough breakdown of the nationalities, ages, experiences, and genders of the respondents.

For each chapter in the book, we ended up with a ranking of tools, and you can see these rankings using the URL below. A score of 70% means that of all the respondents to the survey, 70% of them chose that tool in their top five. As a general rule, we chose the top five or six tools in each category to feature in the book. There were two cases where we used our judgment in promoting one particular tool ahead of another because we felt it was sufficiently important. For example, agile project management has boomed in recent years, and we felt it needed to be included, even though many of our survey respondents did not include it in their top five. We also added in the key idea of transformational leadership, which we had not included in the survey.