SAS Institute of Cary, North Carolina is an organization that fosters innovation, employee loyalty, and customer satisfaction. Over the past three decades, SAS Institute became the largest private software developer and enjoys a history of continued growth in every year of its existence. The success of SAS Institute is a result of its primary resource—its creative capital—which is entrenched in the company through its culture, Human Resource practices, communication, and employee motivation.
SAS Institute is a privately held company that was founded in 1976. The company was founded by Dr. James Goodnight and John Sall, two academics from North Carolina State University. They had created a statistical software package that they used and shared with the faculty at the university. In addition, their software package became popular at other universities across the South. Eventually the popularity for the software package grew too large to be run out of the offices at the university and thus warranted the birth of SAS Institute.
Today, based on the company’s Web site at http://www.sas.com, “SAS is the world’s largest privately held software company with 10,000 employees in more than 400 offices spanning the globe.” Their customers include 96 of the top 100 companies on the 2005 Fortune 500 List and 90 of the top 100 companies on the 2005 Fortune Global 500 List. In each of its 30 years of existence the company reported revenue increases over the previous year culminating in $1.68 billion in 2005. SAS Institute currently has customers in 110 different countries with its software installed at 40,000 business, government, and university sites.
This growth and stability of SAS Institute, especially during the dot-com bust, is no accident. The main source of this success is the ability of SAS Institute to foster it most valuable resource, its creative capital. This creative capital comes through several