All the evidence indicates that State Farm's management is of star quality and always has been. Why should they be, the cynics ask, given that their owners seem barely to rate the name and that their managers, Lord save us, don't even have stock options? In this case, burn the conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom holds that mutuals are not well run. It is a mutual insurance company, owned by its policyholders. State Farm has no stockholders, never has raised a dime in the capital markets, and for its entire 69-year history has subsisted solely on retained earnings. Yet, paradoxically, this capitalistic achiever has the outlines of a Russian collective. And it offers up management lessons on getting close to the customer - something every business pines to do these days and State Farm does almost without equal. In the huge, fragmented market for auto and homeowners' insurance, it is the leader by a mile and still gaining.
companies and has actually been attacked in court for being too rich. Consider: - In dollar worth, State Farm is bigger than all but a fistful of U.S. This marvel is State Farm Insurance of Bloomington, Illinois, and from its low-profile culture rises a batch of high- stepping reasons to grant it notice. flail about, shrinking and waffling over what they want to be, the industry's most successful corporation - indeed, one of the nation's great businesses - marches steadily forward, unchanged in character and goals.
(FORTUNE Magazine) – AS FINANCIAL SERVICE companies all over the U.S.