Abstract

The present study investigates how chief executive officers in the Canadian telecommunications industry acquire and use information about the external business environment, an information seeking activity known as environmental scanning. Data were collected by a nationwide questionnaire survey and several focused interviews. Of the 113 CEOs in the study population, 67 returned completed questionnaires, thus giving a response rate of 59 percent. Personal interviews were then conducted with eight of the respondents. The chief executives collectively perceive the Technological, Customer, and Competition environmental sectors to have the greatest Perceived Strategic Uncertainty – these sectors were perceived to be the most strategic, variable and complex. For each environmental sector, the Amount of Scanning of the sector is positively correlated with the Perceived Strategic Uncertainty of that sector. Generally, the chief executives use multiple, complementary sources in environmental scanning. Personal sources such as customers and subordinate staff are very important in both scanning and decision making, and they are used more frequently than impersonal sources. Nonetheless, impersonal sources such as publications and reports are also frequently used in scanning. In decision making, environmental information from internal sources is used more frequently than that from external sources. For many of the information sources, the frequency of source use is

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