Do all organizations proceed through the five stages? Not necessarily possible, management would like to avoid having the organization reach stage five. However, excluding this stage from our model assumes that organizations follow an unending growth curve or at least hold stable. This obviously is an optimistic assumption. No organization, or society for that matter, can endure for eternity. But some can last for a very long time and outlive any of their members. Standard Oil (now Exxon) and U.S. Steel (now SX), for example, are both more than eighty years old. The U.S. government has been around for more than two hundred years. Whether these examples arc now in the decline stage is questionable, but certainly our model must recognize decline and even the possibility of death.