Do all organizations proceed through the five stages? Not necessarilyl if 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 organizaation, or society for that matter, can enduer lor eternity. But some can last for a very long time and outlive any of their members. Standaed oil (now Exxon) and U.S. Steel (now USX), for example, are both more than eighty years old. The U.S. Rovernment has been around for more than two hundred years. Whether these examples are now in the decline stage is question the possibility of death.