Fifty years is a long time. How long? Well, the Beatles hadn't yet played Ed Sullivan in 1963, and therefore, pretty much no one—on this side of the pond anyway—had any idea John, Paul, George or Ringo existed.
Long enough?
Well, seven months before the mop tops wanted to hold your hand, Bruce Henderson hung a shingle as a one-man consulting unit of the Boston safe Deposit and Trust Company at 100 Franklin Street in Boston. Today, that address is home to a company called Synergy Investments.
I can only wonder if Synergy execs know what was hatched in that location fifty years ago. If those walls could talk, they would echo what must've seemed like preposterous statements by Henderson, including: "We have pioneered strategy consulting. We have changed the philosophy of business competition. We have changed the whole nature of American business. And tomorrow, we can change the world."
Heresy, right? Especially, since McKinsey, Booz Allen, Arthur D. Little and A.T. Kearney had already been doing the management consulting thing for a long time. But, in those days, the Boston Consulting Group was the little engine that could. And it did, often with far fewer resources than the competition. But it also had something else going for it—ideas.
In many ways, BCG was one of the first think tanks or innovation labs. Its early leadership, led by Henderson, sat around a table every Monday morning and talked, and thought, and debated, challenged each other. And they asked why? And why not?
Out of those Henderson brainstorming sessions emerged a firm that was hatching the biggest business ideas of the day—the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, time-based competition. These were the intellectual capital a small start-up would need to punch way above its weight in the early days. And that's just what they did.
This year, BCG celebrates its 50 years… and counting.
Joseph Kornik
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
jkornik@consultingmag.com
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