1 W hat lessons might be taken from SAS’s example and applied in other organisations?

SAS Institute, based in the USA, is the world’s largest private software company. SAS is a developer of analytics software, which helps companies gather, analyse and report on corporate data. SAS began as a research project at North Carolina State University originally formed to analyse agricultural data. SAS co‑founders Jim Goodnight and Jim Barr, faculty members at the university, were the project leaders for the development of the early version of SAS. The founders eventually left the university and founded the SAS Institute, Inc.
and opened their first office in 1976. Between the 1980s and 1990s, SAS became one of the fastest growing companies in America and grew from a dozen employees in a single office to over 11,000 employees in 18 offices across four continents as of 2012.
SAS is frequently cited in lists of the best places to work. SAS has been listed on Fortune’s Best US Companies to Work For every year since the late 1990s and was number one in 2010 and 2011. In addition, the international offices continually make similar lists. For example, SAS Australia was the first non‑US region to be recognised and SAS’s Canadian division is frequently named one of ‘Canada’s Top 100 Employers’ by Mediacorp Canada Inc.
There are several reasons why SAS continually features on these lists.