ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people we want to acknowledge and thank for their participation and help during the creation of this book.

We want to thank all of the business leaders, those executives and managers who took the time and effort to work with us on the study. They identified the high-performing people in their departments and organizations and forwarded them our questionnaire. In many cases, these managers monitored the completion of the questionnaires, collected them, and got them back to us for tabulation and analysis. Many of them also provided valuable feedback after being apprised of the results of the high performers in their organizations, for which we are grateful.

We also want to offer our appreciation to the members of NFI Research, the 2,000 senior executives and managers around the world who answer our bimonthly surveys and provide feedback and suggestions, as they have for the past decade. We want to especially thank all of those members who participated in the study as well as those who answered the surveys that appear in the book.

Thank you to Roger Kelleher at the American Management Association for inviting members to participate in the study and to Maryfran Johnson, editor in chief, CIO magazine and Events, for inviting CIO magazine subscribers to participate. And thanks to Carolyn A. Johnson, CIO research manager, for working with us to contact those IT professionals and for tracking the results with us.

To conduct such a project took a substantial team of researchers, all of whom we would like to especially thank. A special thank-you to the research team coordinators—Danielle Crepeau, Amy Prushinski, Andrew Hatch, and Kathryn Rohlicek—who worked on the early stages of the project to identify categories and industries and coordinated with the researchers to organize, distribute, and collect the questionnaires and provide information back to the participants.

We are deeply grateful to the research team, who worked diligently to conduct the study in companies throughout the United States. So thank you Morgan Dorval, Phillip Hannafin, Brittany Hughes, Ashley Kelloway, Lisa Kemp, Joseph Madden, Melissa Nelson, Ryan O’Hara, Craig Parsons, Cali Rodriguez, and Lindsay Thibeault.

Thank you to the researchers from the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire who helped in various stages of the research, some by contacting organizations to participate and following through to the questionnaire completions. So thanks to Anthony Azarian, Allison Bickford, Anthony Terlizzi, Courtney Sweeney, Casey Cardinal, Christina Rolli, Carling Belden, Christian Kramar, Christopher Croteau, Erin Badger, Fern Strasser, Gregory Halama, Jaclyn Moran, Jenna Vadala, Jessica Dusenberry, Kellen Millard, Kyle Rochefort, Kathleen Burns, Lauren McHugh, Mark Lanciani, Michael DeRoche, Nicholas Filias, Paige Pendleton, Patrick Hussey, Ryan Mill, Stephanie Mitchell, Theodore Bahtsevanos, Victoria Gellatly, and Zachary Lash.

Also thanks to researchers Allyson Gibbs, Aliza Aylward, Ashley Seely, Ariane Harter, Bryan Bartlett, Brenna Tenore, Brendon Sprinkle, Christine Frazier, Corey Marceau, Domenic Botticelli, Danielle Neuffer, Daniel Grube, Garrett White, Garrett Cypher, Jonathan Hinds, Jenna Cardarelli, Kayla Vigneault, Kristin Kendall, Kristen Schwaegerle, Keri Deming, Lauren Gordon, Lindsey Giovinelli, Michelle Sheehan, Nina Shaw, Patrick Poulin, Peter Stanieich, Steven Zimmerman, Timothy Brannelly, and Tyler Loopley.

Thank you to Christina Parisi, my editor at AMACOM, for insight as well as patience throughout the editing process, and to Jacquie Flynn, my original editor, now a literary agent at Joelle Delbourgo Associates, for having the foresight to grasp the concepts here.

Thanks to Aaron A. Reid, Ph.D., chief behavioral scientist, and his team at Sentient Decision Science, LLC, for insight and working with us on the reliability aspects of our survey.

A very special thank-you to the NFI research directors of marketing and publicity: Katy Peters, for creating the original data structure to be able to report on the study, and Cara Sandberg, for tracking and marketing the study results. And thank you to our directors of research, Kevin Wood-Friend, for creating the underlying technology that facilitated the data collection and analysis, and Daniel Lundquist, for conducting our bimonthly surveys as well as the study.

This book could not have been done without the unwavering support from my family, for which I am forever grateful. So my heartfelt and deepest thank-you to Teri, my loving wife and lifelong partner, and Ryan and Chase, our sons, for your constant encouragement and understanding and for always being there for me.