Only 49 companies have been on the Fortune 500 for all 70 years. Here are their secrets to staying in power

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Only 49 companies have been on the Fortune 500 for all 70 years. Here are their secrets to staying in power

By Geoff Colvin | Fortune Magazine | June 2024 Issue

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Only 0.03% of America’s incorporated companies make to Fortune 500 list, and each one must requalify every year; dozens of them typically don’t. Now, as wFortune publish the 70th annual ranking of the Fortune 500, consider an even more exclusive club within this pantheon of U.S. companies. Of the thousands of firms that have come and gone in the 500 since 1955, only 49 have merited membership in every one of those 70 annual rankings. They are America’s corporate Olympians.

What have these extraordinary 49ers got?  An analysis shows that their magic was at work long before the first Fortune 500. The vast majority of them had grown so large by then that they were in the top half of the 1955 ranking. We should note that all of them are manufacturers or oil companies because in 1955 the 500 did not include service companies such as retailers, banks, insurers, utilities, and transportation providers (those industries have been included since 1996). 

But that doesn’t entirely explain why the 49ers have survived and thrived through the 70 years since that first 500.  The key insight comes from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of the bestseller Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. 

After years of study, Collins and Porras derived several principles for leaders. The most important principle, and a central factor in Fortune’s  49ers’ performance, was to “preserve the core and stimulate progress.” Collins, who later wrote the bestsellers Good to Great and Great by Choice, tells Fortune, “The more I live with it, the more I think it might be the deepest explanatory idea across all the multiple decades of research I’ve had the privilege to be involved in.” 

A company’s core, they emphasized, isn’t strategies, structures, technologies, or even culture. Over time, “all that stuff is going to change,” Collins says. The core is a company’s DNA, its reason for being. Collins says he and Porras found that their visionary companies, when seen beside their comparison companies, “had a much deeper allegiance to their core values and a clear sense they had a core purpose beyond just making money.” The virtue of that foundation has attracted much attention in recent years, but it’s hardly new. Some of Fortune’s 49ers adopted it 100 or 200 years ago.

The 49ers are by no means perfect. They didn’t attain their lofty reputations by avoiding bad decisions. That’s impossible. A key factor that sets those companies apart is their superior ability to recover from mistakes. 

After 70 years at the apex of industry in the world’s largest economy, what’s ahead for the 49ers? In theory, their performance says they should be able to carry on indefinitely. But in real life, big companies don’t live forever; the 49ers’ impressive longevity suggests they’re living on borrowed time.

They would probably be wise to follow Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s realist advice. “I predict one day Amazon will fail,” he told an employee meeting in 2018. “Amazon will go bankrupt… We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.” 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Of the thousands of firms that have come and gone in the 500 since 1955, only 49 have merited membership in every one of those 70 annual rankings. 
2. What have these extraordinary 49ers got?  The key insight comes from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of the bestseller Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.   The most important principle, and a central factor in Fortune’s 49ers’ performance, was to “preserve the core and stimulate progress.”  The 49ers are by no means perfect. They didn’t attain their lofty reputations by avoiding bad decisions. That’s impossible. A key factor that sets those companies apart is their superior ability to recover from mistakes. 
3. After 70 years at the apex of industry in the world’s largest economy, what’s ahead for the 49ers? In theory, their performance says they should be able to carry on indefinitely. But in real life, big companies don’t live forever; the 49ers’ impressive longevity suggests they’re living on borrowed time.

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Topics:  Strategy, Business Model, Fortune 500, Core, Competitive Advantage, Corporate Sustainability, Sustainable Performance, Longevity