Fortune has released its Most Admired Companies list for 2009. As usual with these lists, the value is not in the list itself, but the information gleaned about commonalities and differences between the companies featured. Here are the best lines from the print edition which sets up the list.

*Most important is a strong, stable strategy, which confers important benefits in unstable times. Companies that change strategies must usually change organizational structures as well and making that change in a recession is a heavy burden just when corporations can bear it least. It forces employees to focus inward rather than outward and becomes a giant sink of time and energy.

… less admired companies change structures far more often than the Most Admired, the reason being a strategy shift.

By contrast, Most Admired “are more confident in their strategies and as a result are more likely to use this opportunity for rapid expansion and a chance to take market share,” says Mel Stark…

Says [Coca-Cola] CEO Muhtar Kent: Crises offer you the best opportunity to communicate with consumers because the airwaves are cleaner….

… you may wonder what the magical winning structure is. Turns out there isn’t one. … the Most Admired have every type of structure … They’ll even do the same things differently in different parts of their company.

What the Most Admired do share is a focus on identifying and developing talent globally.*

The question now becomes just how big is your reach in terms of quality. Are you responsible for just a single component? Product? Product Line? Division? A country? The whole shebang?

From either working for them, or knowing people who do, a common failure mode of a lot of startups is a lack of confidence in their strategy — largely because they have, or are starting to, realized that it is not as high quality as they once thought. Sometimes switching mid-course works. Take for instance Flickr which started out as a game then commercialized (with great success) one tiny aspect of the product.

On the flipside, companies that will not lift succeed in spite of themselves change strategy with the current winds. Consumer facing? Nah, that’s so last week; we’re targeting the enterprise now. But what about the 6 products that are consumer oriented? Well, we’re going to keep selling those to anyone who wants them, but they aren’t going to get any development resources…

In testing terms, that sort of strategic confusion is a violation of the Consistency Oracle and would have a pretty big bug logged against it. I’m not sure how many CEOs would appreciate a Critical bug filed against Strategy show up in their mailbox though.