Bruce Henderson

The Boston Consulting Group launched the BCG Henderson Institute in honor of Henderson on his hundredth birthday. In January 2018, the BCG Henderson Institute was ranked the third Best For Profit Global Think Tank by the University of Pennsylvania. The institute operates hubs in Europe and Asia and is headquartered in New York.

As a managerial tool, the experience curve is still in use in the 2010s; for example, by Petrobras in oil field development.

"The strategic implications of the experience curve came closer to shattering earth."—The Economist, 2009

An engineer by training, Henderson never tired of quoting Archimedes to aspiring staff: "Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world".—Carl W. Stern, 2006

He was fond of quoting Jay Forrester: "While most people understand first-order effects, few deal well with second-and third-order effects. Unfortunately, virtually everything interesting in business lies in fourth-order effects and beyond"—Carl W. Stern, 2006

The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair in International Management was endowed by BCG in 1995 at INSEAD. It is currently held by W. Chan Kim.

Henderson died at the age of 77, ten days after suffering a heart stroke at his home in Nashville in 1992. He was survived by his second wife, four children with his first wife, and seven grandchildren.

A memorial service was held with an overflow of attendees at the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard, Cambridge, on December 11, 1992, amidst a blizzard. Speakers at the service included John S. Clarkson, then-president and chief executive officer of BCG, George Stalk, a senior vice president of BCG, and Alan Zakon, former BCG chairman.

"Competition existed long before strategy. It began with life itself."—Bruce D. Henderson, 1989

The article "The Origin of Strategy" (1989) in this area was the last article he published.

Henderson received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1985 by the University School of Nashville, from which he had graduated in 1932.

The Bruce D. Henderson Scholarship was endowed in 1985 by the Boston Consulting Group to honor Henderson and awarded to the MBA student at the Owen School of Management of Vanderbilt University, who, during the first year, achieved the strongest record in personal, professional, and academic performance.

Bruce created the publication entitled Perspectives as a new form of marketing and in response to the McKinsey Quarterly and Arthur D. Little's Prism. He wrote extensively for the publication until 1980.

Henderson stepped down from his role as the president and CEO of Boston Consulting Group in 1980. He was succeeded by Alan Zakon. By that time, he had grown BCG from a one-man-shop to a global firm with seven offices and 249 consultants. He continued as the chairman until 1985. He retired and went to Nashville, Tennessee, to teach at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

By the early 1980s, the lessons of the experience curve led Henderson to shift his thinking beyond the bankruptcy of mainstream economics. He began to imagine a new and far more powerful kind of economics. The realization that organizations are not static machines but complex, dynamic systems that learn from experience led him to begin seeing companies as living, growing organisms. Following this logic, Henderson began to argue that the competition in the economy's market niches was remarkably like competition in nature's ecologic niches.

In 1978 Henderson was inducted by Vanderbilt's School of Engineering as a Distinguished Alumnus.

"The goal of the hottest economic war, is an agreement for coexistence, not annihilation"—Bruce D. Henderson, 1976

In 1974 Henderson made BCG an independent business and was one of the first to take advantage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 that allowed the establishment of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The ESOP began the process of buying BCG from The Boston Company, the parent corporation of Boston Safe Deposit. The buyout was completed in 1979, five years ahead of schedule.

Between 1974 and 1980, Henderson focused on growing the firm and expanding its international presence. By the end of 1977, revenues were split evenly among business originating in the United States and overseas.

The growth-share matrix evolved as a collaborative effort of BCG employees in the period between 1968 and 1970. The theory underpinning it was laid out in the BCG perspective The Product Portfolio in 1970.

Upon leaving Arthur D. Little, Henderson accepted a challenge from the CEO of Boston Company to create a consulting arm for the bank, operating as a subsidiary under the name Management and Consulting Division of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. This consulting arm began its operations in 1963. Initially, it advised clients of the bank. Billings for the first month were only US$500. Nevertheless, Henderson hired his second consultant, Arthur P. Contas, in December 1963.

In 1959, Henderson left the company to join the consulting firm Arthur D. Little as a senior vice president for management services. He left the firm in 1963 over disagreements with the firm's leadership.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Henderson to a team of five analysts who evaluated foreign aid programs in Germany under the Marshall Plan.

Henderson began his career as a salesman in the Southwestern Advantage entrepreneurial program. He went on to attend and earn an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1937, before attending Harvard Business School. He left Harvard only ninety days before graduation to work for the Westinghouse Corporation. Henderson worked there for 18 years. He became the vice president at the age of 37, making him one of the youngest vice presidents in the company's history.

Bruce Doolin Henderson (April 30, 1915 – July 20, 1992) was an American businessman and management expert. He founded Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts and headed the firm as the president and CEO until 1980. He continued to serve as chairman of BCG until 1985.

Henderson was born on a farm in Nashville, Tennessee on 30 April 1915. In the fourth grade, he enrolled in the Peabody Demonstration School (PDS) and remained there until his high school graduation in 1932.