Most influential company/organization

1. Microsoft
2. IBM
3. General Electric

Among dozens of other organizations cited, many picked the "U.S. government" or branches of it (the IRS, Defense Department), along with AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Ford, Disney, Wal-Mart, Federal Express, OPEC, Russia's Communist Party, and Harvard Business School.

Up the Organization

Citations for the "most influential company/organization" conformed to choices for most significant innovations and most influential leaders. Microsoft finished convincingly at the top of the field overall. (Older alumni were evenly divided between the software giant and its closest challenger, IBM, while younger alumni put Microsoft well ahead of Big Blue.) It was IBM that first gave business "the ability to process information that has transformed the world," one respondent asserted. General Electric finished third with both groups, with General Motors a distant fourth.