Data for the study were obtained from 37 chief executive officers of small to medium-sized high technology companies in Northern California's Silicon Valley, through semi-structured interviews in the context of a larger study [9]. The median company size was 180 employees, and it varied between 45 and 2200. Data on several other organizational attributes were also collected. The CEOs were all males and their median age was 47. In total, 110 CEOs were contacted and 37 agreed to participate. The high technology organizational environment in Silicon Valley can be characterized as one which is dynamic, turbulent, geographically concentrated, and unstable. Care must be taken in generalizing results to other types of organizational environments and larger organizations.
The questioning in the semi-structured interviev^/ had the flavor of an event protocol. The CEOs were asked to describe various aspects of their scanning behavior in relation to three strategic threats and opportunities, of their choice, v>/hich they were currently experiencing. "Strategic" was defined as anything having potentially large impact on the company. Several general questions pertaining to their use of information sources for strategic information were also asked. Prior to that, a pilot test was run on a separate sample of 16 executives (upper middle and top managers) attending the Stanford Executive Program in order to debug the research instrument.
We examine the findings pertaining to strategic scanning below, starting with the types of strategic information sources that the CEOs use, followed by the types of strategic information they access, and then their various scanning modes.