Area Development
IBM conducted 1,130 interviews with chief executives, general managers, business leaders and public-sector heads in the course of completing the research for its third biennial Global CEO Study, which aims to identify the key characteristics of the Enterprise of the  Future. This paper focuses on the responses of the 136 "midmarket CEOs" who head midsize organizations (defined as companies that employ fewer than 1,000 people). As part of its research, IBM sought to understand the differences between the responses of financial outperformers and those of underperformers. It compared the revenue and profit track records of those companies with publicly available financial information against the averages for their industries within its sample. It labeled companies that performed above the average on a particular financial benchmark outperformers, and those below the average underperformers. Throughout its analyses, IBM looked for insights based on these top- and bottom-half groupings.