Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Part VII

Value-Driven

Certain principles of management and leadership are timeless and enduring. One principle in particular is as old as commerce itself: the mandate to create value. Organizations that don't deliver value cannot last. Value is both an objective measure and the engine of future growth. It is what attracts shareholders and rewards them. And it is the currency for attracting and retaining the best people. It is not the only objective function and is not always particularly inspiring. But without it, nothing else is viable in the long term.

The quest to create value for our clients is at the very center of what has driven BCG since its founding. In this section, we open with a chapter on where it all started for us: with founder Bruce Henderson's assessment of the experience curve he pioneered, “The Experience Curve Reviewed.” He wrote his original Perspective on the topic in 1966, and it's no exaggeration to say it changed the business world. It was the first systematic approach to business strategy and literally spawned a new management discipline. It was also the genesis of strategy consulting as an industry.

For Henderson, the experience curve was emblematic of his fundamental desire to search out the underlying truth, based on a unique blend of empirical facts, experience, and insight. With the experience curve, he observed something that now is widely understood as a general principle yet had never before been articulated: that every doubling of experience (cumulative ...