For five years at the end of the last century, my grandfather delighted in being the oldest living All Black. The All Blacks are New Zealand’s national rugby union team, often regarded as the most successful sports team in history.

As it happened, my grandpa only played one match for them before injury put paid to his rugby career. That was in 1921, but he wore this affiliation like a badge of honor right up until his death at the age of 99.

The All Blacks were revered a hundred years ago, and they still are. This makes them a perfect case study for Professor Alex Hill, co-founder and director of the Centre for High Performance, a collaboration between Kingston University London, Duke University, London Business School, and the University of Oxford.

Building Centennial Organizations

For more than a decade, he’s researched organizations that have outperformed their peers for over 100 years. In addition to the New Zealand All Blacks, he’s studied NASA, Eton College and the Royal Shakespeare Company, among other household names.

Hill has identified 12 habits they share, looking at how they analyze success and failure, recruit great talent, and create new products and ideas. He lays these out in his new book, “Centennials,” and offers advice for others who aspire to such longevity today.

In this clip from our Expert Interview, Hill reflects on how corporate behavior can embed itself from generation to generation. (You can stream the audio clip below or read a transcript here.)

The How and Why of Centennial Organizations

Hill acknowledges that not all organizations are in it for the long haul. Some don’t want to last 100 years, so for them, a focus on short-term returns is appropriate.

“A lot of management thinking comes from business, and actually those principles and ideas are great if you want to burn bright, but then disappear,” he says. “But if you don’t want to do that and you want to build something that’s going to last, then you have to think in a very different way.”

And this is a worthy goal, he believes, as “centennial” organizations deliver benefits for communities and society as a whole, as well as for themselves.

“They help us solve bigger, more complex questions, things like climate change or poverty or health or education, where actually you’re building a collective knowledge in an institution that is growing over time. An...