Sanity Inc.

In a way, the lavish benefits offered by SAS set a performance standard on which everything else is based: This is the level at which SAS respects its employees, and this is the level of respect that SAS expects in return. The sense of accountability at SAS is so ingrained, and the lines of reporting there are so simple, that the company needs no formal organization chart. As it grows, SAS tends to get wider -- spawning new divisions -- rather than taller. Indeed, the company is so brutally flat that on the Cary campus, many of the several thousand front-line employees who work there -- from housekeepers to coders with PhDs -- are just two or three steps in the corporate hierarchy from Jim Goodnight.

Larnell Lennon says that what surprised him most when he arrived at SAS -- besides getting his own office -- was how his manager spent his time. "My manager is doing what I'm doing," says Lennon. "She is in the trenches, writing code. Dr. Goodnight was once in the same group that I'm in. At my last job, my manager was just making sure that everything got done. Here, we all do that."

Xan Gregg, 33, works in John Sall's group. And Sall has plenty to say "about the details of how code is written," says Gregg. "That's unusual for an executive vice president. Usually managers are not very technical." Sall, an almost impossibly shy and unassuming billionaire, says that he sees himself primarily as "a statistician and a software developer -- not a businessperson or a manager."

Nothing corrodes respect between a boss and an employee more quickly than the sense that the boss has no idea what the employee is doing. Managers who understand the work that they oversee can make sure that details don't slide. At SAS, groups agree on deadlines, and managers understand what their groups do -- so unrealistically optimistic promises about time-tables and completion dates are relatively rare.

Bob Snyder, 45, an applications developer who was recently hired away from Texas Instruments, where he had worked on the guidance systems for Paveway bombs, says, "Here, I know everything I do has an impact on the final product. That gives you a sense of responsibility to get things done right and on time. In the bomb factory, with all its bureaucracy, if you screwed something up, you sent a letter to someone saying, 'I screwed up.' Here, a goof is a deliverable goof."

Of course, SAS is made up of ordinary mortals. It's a place where product releases run late, where sales quotas don't get met, where groups are understaffed, where people clash over both substance and style. One recent hire griped that SAS is too family-friendly: "It's hard to eat lunch without stepping on a rug-rat."

Some might even suggest that the mood at SAS -- the cheeriness, the contentment -- could become grating. The place can come across as being a bit too perfect, as if working there might mean surrendering some of your personality. Skeptical reporters and sneering outsiders have occasionally referred to SAS as "Stepford Corporation" -- a place with a sophisticated plantation mentality, where the boss lives (as Goodnight does) in a mansion adjacent to the corporate campus, and where your lunch tab is automatically deducted from your paycheck. You may not owe your salary to the company store, but what about your soul?

There are two problems with that interpretation. The first is embodied in a guy named Toby Trott. Trott, 45, has worked at SAS as a technical-support representative for 14 years. He's a big man, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard. He wears shorts, shuns socks, and to keep comfortable in his office (equipped with Unix, Mac, and Wintel machines), he sports a pair of $1.98 flip-flops. Before coming to SAS, Trott had 15 jobs -- in places ranging from a mattress factory to a cancer-research lab. He doesn't head for greener pastures at some other tech firm, because there, he says, "they'd make me cut my hair." SAS is "a little saner" than most places where he's worked. "It takes a little wackiness to make it saner. This place is not repressed: You're free to express yourself."

The second, and in some ways more pointed, answer to the Stepford Corporation criticism is this: The people who work at SAS are the opposite of programmed drones. In the new economy, the kinds of people whom SAS employs are the most desirable assets available to an organization. They are the brains, the talent; they are the source of the growth at every growth-oriented company.

None of them -- from Toby Trott up to John Sall -- would have any trouble getting a job elsewhere. The Raleigh area is a kind of Silicon Pocket Park. IBM has more employees in the Research Triangle than it has anywhere else in the world. Nortel, Sprint, Glaxo-Wellcome, Unisys, Quintiles Transnational, Cisco -- you don't have to leave town to work at any of these companies. People who work at SAS have made a conscious decision to stay there.

Beyond FUD