That is the question this study exists to answer. This page sets out the research question, the instrument, who takes part, what we publish, how the study is funded — and the things we are careful not to claim.
Senior leaders are respected in rooms. Whether that respect is findable — by a client, a search committee, a journalist, or an AI assistant answering a question about them — is a different matter entirely, and almost nobody has measured it on themselves.
The research question. How large is the gap between how findable senior leaders believe their professional authority is, and how findable it demonstrably is in the public record — and what accounts for that gap?
The study is run by Stardom Books, an international publishing house with offices in Coppell, Texas and Bengaluru, India, which has published more than 260 business leaders. It began because we kept meeting remarkable people whose public record said almost nothing about them, and we had no way to show them the size of the problem.
Participants complete a structured evaluation in seven parts, taking about thirty minutes. It is not a survey and not a quiz: it collects a participant's own account of their work in their own words, and then asks them to verify that account against the live public record, in real time, while they are with us.
Two scores are produced for each participant. A self-rated score, given before any verification; and a verified score, derived from what the participant themselves finds when they search. The distance between the two is the measure the study is built around.
Both scores are composed across five dimensions: the digital footprint, published thinking, a flagship or signature work, speaking presence, and citation by others.
The study's first published figures — the average self-rated score, the average verified score, and the distribution of the gap between them — will appear here with the number of completed evaluations they are drawn from, and the date. We do not publish a finding without the sample it came from.
The study looks at senior professional authority, so participation is open to people who have some of it to measure. In practice that means a senior leadership, founding, partner or equivalent role; a meaningful span of years in a field; and a public professional presence that can be examined. Those are the criteria, and they are about fit for the research rather than anything else.
The study recruits through two routes. Participants invited through a partner organization, or by Stardom directly, take part at no cost. Participants who come to the evaluation independently purchase it at ₹40,000 / $400 and consent separately to their responses being used in the findings.
Both groups receive the same evaluation, the same report and the same session, and both are reported together with that distinction noted. An invited participant is never asked for payment at any point.
The study runs in waves, so that findings can be reported against a defined period rather than an open-ended one.
Each participant receives their complete evaluation and a full individual report built from their own answers — their two scores, the gap across five dimensions, and a twelve-month view — together with a session with a senior publishing advisor. Outside the study the evaluation and session are ₹40,000 / $400.
In return, the participant's responses contribute, in anonymised and aggregated form, to the study's findings. That is the whole of the exchange, and it is the reason there is no fee: a participant is a participant, not a customer.
Where a professional body, chamber, alumni chapter or community invites its members to take part, we produce the aggregate picture for that cohort once thirty members have completed the evaluation. The organization's name appears on the cover alongside ours and it is free to publish the findings as it wishes.
The floor of thirty is not arbitrary. It exists so that no individual can be identified from an aggregate, and we do not produce a cohort report below it under any circumstances.
Participation is voluntary and begins with consent. Before the evaluation starts, participants are told what is collected, that their responses are used in aggregate for the study, and that they may withdraw.
What we hold. A participant's own answers, their two scores, and the contact details they gave us, in order to deliver their report and their session.
What we publish. Aggregates only. No individual is ever named, ranked or identifiable in any published finding or cohort report.
What we never do. We do not sell data. We do not pass a participant's details to a partner organization, to another partner, or to any third party. Where an organization invites its members, that organization receives counts only — how many clicked, started, completed and booked — and its dashboard cannot display a name, because it only ever runs aggregate queries. No organization gives us a member list, and we would decline one.
Withdrawal. A participant may ask us at any time to delete their data and remove their responses from the study. Write to advisor@authorityquotient.com and it will be done. Anonymised figures already published in an aggregate cannot be retrospectively unpublished, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.
We would rather state this plainly than have anyone work it out for themselves.
The study is funded entirely by Stardom Books, which is a commercial publishing house. We receive no external or institutional funding.
Our interest is straightforward. We publish business leaders; that is our business. Some proportion of the people who take part in this study later decide they want a book or a body of work of their own, and come to us at a time of their choosing. That is the whole of the commercial model, and we judge that doing this properly for several hundred senior people is worth more to us over a decade than any pitch would be.
Where an organization has invited its members under a partner arrangement, that choice is never put to its members at all. Their reports render with no offer and no price anywhere in them, and the automated follow-up sequences that would otherwise invite a booking do not run. This is a property of how the platform is built rather than an undertaking we ask anyone to take on trust, and any participant or office bearer is welcome to verify it by taking the evaluation.
Outside such an arrangement, a participant who has completed the study may hear from us about Stardom's publishing programmes, by email, with one-click unsubscribe. We think that is the honest description of it.
This study is not peer reviewed, and no finding from it has been submitted to or accepted by a journal.
It is not conducted under a university affiliation and has not been reviewed by an ethics board or institutional review board.
The instrument is not a psychometrically validated one. It is a structured instrument of our own design, and where we describe a score as verified we mean verified against the public record by the participant, not validated in the psychometric sense.
Participants are self-selected, not randomly sampled, and the population is senior professionals who were invited or who came to us. Findings describe that population and should not be read as representative of any broader one.
If any of this changes — a collaborator, a review panel, a validation study — this page will say so, and will say when.
Thirty minutes, seven parts. You receive your own complete report and an advisory session, and your responses contribute to the study.
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The Authority Quotient Study is a research programme of Stardom Group (Stardom Books).
112 Bordeaux Ct., Coppell, Texas 75019, USA · Clayworks Jayanagar, Bengaluru 560004, India
Questions about the methodology, or a request to withdraw: advisor@authorityquotient.com