Boston Consulting Group

The Boston Consulting Group is an international strategy and general management consulting firm whose mission is to help leading corporations create and sustain competitive advantage. As a truly international firm, our strong global presence offers clients and employees a wealth of cross-cultural experience. Bruce Henderson establishes a consulting unit with Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), based in Boston, Massachusetts, is one the most influential business strategy consulting firms in the world. BCG employs some 2,800 consultants drawn from the ranks of America's top business schools, including the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton (University of Pennsylvania). A major share of the firm's clients are among the world's 500 largest corporations, but BCG also advises mid-sized companies and nonprofits as well as performing some government work. The company's areas of expertise include branding, corporate development, deconstruction, globalization, organization, pricing, strategy, and technology and communications. BCG maintains more than 50 offices located across North America, South America, Europe, the Far East, and Australia. BCG's founder, Bruce Doolin Henderson, was born in 1930 in Nashville, Tennessee. His father was a Bible publisher. Henderson attended Vanderbilt, earning an engineering degree in 1937. Following brief stints with Frigidaire and Leland Electric Co., he attended Harvard Business School. Henderson dropped out three months before graduation to take a position with Westinghouse Corporation, starting out in sales. He worked his way up the ranks, eventually making vice-president. In 1959, he made a career change and went to work for Arthur D. Little & Co, one of the early pioneers in the business consulting field. Major clients of his included Shell Oil and United Fruit Co., but Henderson soon grew frustrated that at ADL he was unable to fully explore his ideas on how corporations should made their decisions. He shared his views with the CEO of Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Co., another ADL client, and was promptly recruited to start up a consulting department for the bank. Starting out as the only employee, Henderson launched his consulting unit with Boston Safe Deposit in 1963. He hired his first staff person by the end of the year but still had difficulty landing clients. In 1964, he found a way to attract attention, publishing the first of his "Perspectives," which were short essays designed to stimulate the thinking of senior management. Henderson called them "a punch between the eyes." In truth, he derived the idea from Reader's Digest. He summarized interesting business articles and other relevant writings, compiled them as a letter, and then mailed the so-called Perspective to an exclusive list of top executives. Each of Henderson's Perspectives, which came to be mailed out ten times a year, evolved into an essay presenting his take on the latest business topics. A gimmick in many respects, the Perspectives established Henderson's business in the eyes of corporate America. According to company lore, it was in the fall of 1965, when the business housed about a dozen consultants, that Henderson announced at a staff meeting that they needed a way to find a specialty to distinguish themselves from their larger, better financed rivals. After dismissing a number of suggestions, he offered "business strategy." The immediate objection was that executives would have no idea what they were talking about. "That's the beauty of it," was his response. "We'll define it." The first of Henderson's revolutionary tools, introduced in 1966, was called the "experience curve," which resulted from work done for a semiconductor manufacturer. It held that unit costs go down as a company gains production experience. The experience curve concept allowed client Texas Instruments to underbid rivals by postulating falling unit costs. Ultimately, the concept led to