The Businessworld Most Respected Companies list is based on a rigorous nationwide peer-perception survey, unlike most jury- based listings. This year, 1,078 (563 in the first phase and 515 in the second) senior managers across the country working in 17 industrial and service sectors were polled in an eight- month exercise to come up with the results.

The first step was the pre-selection process, which created a shortlist of companies to be ranked in the survey. We provided IMRB International - our partner in the research process - with a list of companies who are leaders (by way of revenues, profitability or marketshare) in the 17 sectors. (This year, three new sectors were added to last year's 14). In all, this list had 382 companies.

The individual sectors were surveyed first to come up with the sectoral rankings. IMRB's surveyors fanned out to eight cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune. They asked 563 senior managers with an average work experience of 21 years to identify the 10 most respected companies in their respective sectors. The companies were rated on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being 'very poor' and 10 being 'excellent') on 19 pre-defined parameters.

The ranking for overall quality was done by taking into account both the number of respondents who voted for a company as well as the ranks they assigned in order to get the correct, weighted score. If a company was selected by 30 out of 40 respondents in a sector, the mean score on overall quality was multiplied by the number of respondents who chose the company to arrive at the total score.

Once the sectoral rankings were done, the Top 3 firms in each sector (Top 5 for sectors like IT which have a large number of firms) was compiled. Thus, 68 firms were shortlisted for the second round to identify the Top 10 Most Respected Companies overall.

This second stage saw a major modification from last year's survey, and was done to bring in more robustness to the overall respect rankings. In this phase, 515 respondents - some from the original set and some new ones - were polled to arrive at the overall top 10 rankings.

Each year, this survey also tries to capture the dynamic nature of industry. Hence, while last year we had only 14 sectors, this year three sunrise sectors have also been added - IT-Enabled Services, Insurance and

Auto Ancillaries. And we decided to restrict the telecom sector to service providers, preferring to club the handset manufacturers in the Consumer Durables category.

Another new feature of this year's poll was an additional module in the first phase where the respondents were asked to rank firms in sectors with a high consumer interface - Telecom and Travel & Hospitality - based on their opinion as customers.

The survey also collated open-ended data for three special categories - Most Globally Competitive, Most Ethical and Most Dynamic.