Congratulations to SAS, the North Carolina-based software business, which has been chosen by Fortune magazine as its “best company to work for” in 2010.
I met SAS’s founder, Dr Jim Goodnight, in London five years ago. An impressive man, he was pretty unsentimental about business. To him it just made sense to treat employees well and provide generous benefits. The company HQ, just outside Raleigh, the state capital, is a campus where all sorts of personal services (hairdressers, laundry, fitness classes and so on) are available.
Dr Goodnight told me it was simply more efficient to try and retain more good staff through this sort of benign management. Interestingly, SAS is a privately-held company. (It is in fact the world’s largest privately held software company.)
“Being private gives us the ability to be more long-range oriented, instead of having to produce those quarterly numbers,” Dr Goodnight told me back then. “You can make yourself look really good for a quarter if you want to: cut back on travel, cut back on investment, cut back on everything and the numbers will look good. But in the end over the long term that sort of behaviour is going to catch up with you.”
It seems to work. The 34 year old company had revenues of $2.3bn in 2008, and remains a leading player in the “business intelligence” market.
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