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The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

businessfinancing.co.uk

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Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#81

Post by jariel »

flukus wrote: post #67
ineedasername wrote: post #59

Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are l…

Isn't this just survivorship bias? There are many churches, many splits and many died out along the way and your only looking at the few that survived and became dominant. There aren't a lot (if any) of roman, Greek, Norse institutions still around and even within Christianity I don't think there are any Lollard or Cathar ones.

I don't think it's survivorship bias because the same would apply to any number of other types of organisations.

Also, there's a simple explanation which almost bothers me to point out because I think anyone with any sense of the greater good would see it immediately even if they were not faithful themselves; 'Religious' folks at least of the common era, tend to have faith in something much greater, and enduring than themselves, and so the 'hard work' they might put into building the Cathedral at Koln which took like 700 years makes easy sense, because it's there for future generations to see, be inspired by, enjoy the fruits of. That's not exactly a 'benefit' to someone who wants to be 'rich now', but it's a benefit to those who believe in the future. Although I guess there's still an ego play whereby some people think they can project their fame well into the future no doubt.

And FYI there really were not that-that many competing religions post-common era.

Note how 'bar' and/or 'brewery' (and eatery) tends to be the other 'longest lived'.

Well, every town needs a pub, the one already there is probably good enough. A pub isn't going to attract the competitive afflictions of the nobility or be destroyed by a conquering dude bent on making sure there's no uprising. They're almost the 'original brand' as well. Finally, some of them were taken on by Monks (thank you Belgium!) which gives them another bit of longevity consistency.

The other entity not mentioned are noble households. Queen Elizabeth is actually a descendant of pre-Norman kings even. I think it's actually direct (though not direct of all precedent kings as there was some bouncing around, but all around the same rough lineage). I don't know off the top of my head the true antiquity of some households, but it's pretty far back in many cases.

To me the map also hints that successful civilisations have a lot of consistency and continuity ....

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#83

Post by jariel »

paxys wrote: post #45
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #15

I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.

At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?

It wasn't an Empire until well into the Enlightenment. England was not really important at all for the longest time.

QE2 and House of 'Windsor' (heavy quotes) however, can trace their lineage back to the days pre-Norma invasion, so a little over 1K years by that measure.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#84

Post by hnewsshadowbans »

alpha_squared wrote: post #74
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First Council of Nicaea established church structure and Canon law. Also, we can trace the unbroken line of successive bishops to that date. The Great Schism of 1054 can be viewed as just a corporate split due to political pressure, which it was. It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.

> It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company. It sort of did, though. Easier to define your own standards when you don't need consensus from peers, no? In either case, I think it's funny to consider the Roman Catholic Church as "the parent company". It's a little dismissive of all other Apostolic Sees and sort of rewrites history a bit to imply that Roman Catholicism was the root of…

The Bishop of Rome was considered the preeminent by all the other major sees. Its just whether he was first among equals or outright leader that was the controversy. So the RCC has a bit of a claim as the parent..

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#85

Post by oh_sigh »

ineedasername wrote: post #59

Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are l…

> I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

But there is no indication of a continuity of aims among those organizations - they just continue to exist over long periods of time. There was a silly meme going around a while back about how the Catholic church "thinks in centuries, not decades". But that is clearly not the case, considering the Catholic church contradicts or overrides its own stances, even ones it viewed as very important at the time, from centuries ago.

What good is having an ultra long lasting organization for long term projects, if someone who comes into power 100 years later may have exactly the opposite viewpoint on the project as the initiator?

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#86

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

krilly wrote: post #55
dredmorbius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oldest continuously operating university in the Western Hemisphere is in Peru, established in 1551. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_of_San_Mar... The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, in Mexico City, was founded several months later, the same year.

If I were feeling pedantic I'd mention the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen... As well as a handful in Spain and Portugal ;)

Cambridge is pretty old as well.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#87

Post by dextralt »

crooked-v wrote: post #73
manfredo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the above commenter wrote that all of precolonial Africa had a single culture, only that precolonial cultures evidently did not have cultures with long standing businesses - at least as we understand businesses them today.

That's still attributing a single negative cultural trait to an entire continent, and using it to shallowly dismiss the effects of centuries of one-sided exploitation, enslavement, massacres, genocides, mass limb removal, debt slavery, literal slavery, etc etc. with "but what if it was their own fault?".

you mean the same things we did to each other throughout our entire history and yet somehow our civilization had advanced past the stone age?

yeah, it is their own fault, lmao.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#88

Post by ineedasername »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #66
ineedasername wrote: post #59

Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are l…

>Enter religious institutions: Ballpark estimates in my head indicate that, sure, some come & go quickly, but many have much more staying power than their pure corporate counterparts. Sounds like survivor-ship bias. How many now-dead religions were contemporary with Christianity?

I'm not sure it matters if, long ago, many religions were short lived. All that means is that over the millennia religions have evolved into much longer-lived entities, while corporations have not. Meaning they still present a useful case study for institutions capable of outliving a few short human life spans. And even then, looking at many dead religions (Greek, Roman, for example) they still held sway for hundreds of years, much longer than a typical corporation.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#89

Post by Yessing »

microtherion wrote: post #9
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Interesting elements to me: - The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest-national businesses. - And banks / mints / financial institutions. - The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996. This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns ar…

I suspect the former; that standards applied in various countries differ. E.g. the oldest "company" in Switzerland is Gasthof Sternen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasthof_Sternen ), built around 1230, and affiliated with a monastery. Quite possibly the inn WAS in continuous operation, but I have doubts as to the continuity of the "company" behind it. It appears to have been started by the adjacent monastery, which…

for example Café M’Rabet – Tunis was created in 1630 and it is still operational till now. But it was not registered as a company at the time.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#90

Post by ineedasername »

nitwit005 wrote: post #79
ineedasername wrote: post #59

Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are l…

If you had a convenient time machine and gathered up say, a group Catholics from today, a group from 100 years ago, and a group from 1000 years ago, you'd have three groups of people with radically different beliefs. They might even disagree with the idea they followed the same religion. Part of what makes religions last is bending to the changing times. A lot of the ones that didn't have faded away.

An excellent point. There's even plenty of room within many religions for some degree of differences in belief. The buffet-style Catholic comes to mind. But I think a fundamental difference between religions & corporations is that religious institutions have fewer incentives to make decisions that favor the short term over the long term. That, combined with the flexibility to change (even if at a glacial place as religions often do) may be the key to their longevity.
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