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Founded by Bruce Henderson in 1963, in Boston.1
History
Early history
Bruce Henderson founded the Boston Consulting Group in 1963 as part of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Henderson had been recruited from Arthur D. Little to establish the consulting arm as a department within the bank. Initially, the department only advised clients of the bank. Henderson hired his first full-time consultant, Arthur P. Contas, in December 1963.
In 1966, Henderson developed the concept of the experience curve, arguing that unit costs decline predictably with production experience. The experience curve effect was quickly adopted in corporate strategy.
In 1966, the consulting unit opened a second office in Tokyo, Japan, led by James Abegglen.
In 1967, Henderson offered Bill Bain a consulting role. Bain agreed and joined in 1967 at a starting salary of $17,000 per year (equivalent to $164,000 in 2025). He thrived at the job and soon rose to the rank of group vice president. In the early 1970s, Bain was considered internally to be Henderson's eventual successor. However, Bain resigned from BCG in 1973 to start his own strategy consulting firm, Bain & Company.
In 1968, the division had grown to 36 employees and was formally named the Boston Consulting Group. The same year, BCG hired Sandra Ohrn Moose, the firm's first female consultant. In the 1970s, Henderson arranged an employee stock ownership plan so that BCG could operate independently. The buyout of all shares was completed in 1979.
In 1970, BCG consultant Alan Zakon created the growth-share matrix, a chart to help large corporations decide how to allocate cash among their business units. Bruce Henderson further developed the concept, and it was soon widely disseminated among senior managers and executives.
Growth and international expansion
In 1974, BCG opened its second U.S. office in Menlo Park, California. A year later, BCG opened an office in Munich. John Clarkeson led this European expansion. By the end of 1977, BCG's revenues were evenly split between business originating in the U.S. and overseas. BCG soon opened another U.S. office in Chicago and by the end of the decade the firm employed 277 consultants.
In 1980, Alan Zakon succeeded Bruce Henderson as CEO. Henderson assumed the chairmanship of the board for five years until he retired from BCG and became a management professor at Vanderbilt University. During this period the firm opened offices in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, New York, and San Francisco. John Clarkeson became CEO in 1985, and the firm continued to expand across Europe.
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In 1988, a Harvard Business Review essay by BCG consultant George Stalk Jr. introduced the concept of time-based competition that reconsidered the role of time management in providing market advantages. Stalk Jr. and another BCG consultant, Thomas Hout, further developed the idea in a 1990 book.
In 1990, BCG acquired the Australian consulting firm of Pappas, Carter, Evans & Koop and its offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland. More acquisitions and international expansion followed. In 1993, BCG employed around 1,000 consultants, leading to new offices across Europe, Asia, and North America.
Carl Stern replaced John Clarkeson as BCG's CEO in 1998. That same year, Bolko von Oetinger, a senior partner at BCG's Munich office, founded the Strategy Institute, an independent research unit.
Recent history
In 2003, Hans-Paul Bürkner was elected president and chief executive of BCG. Bürkner became the first European to lead the firm, which at that time had around 2,600 consultants worldwide. In 2005, three BCG partners, Perry Keenan, Kathleen Conlon, and Alan Jackson, published a Harvard Business Review article outlining their DICE framework, a formulation they'd first developed in the 1990s that assessed the likelihood of project success based on objective measures. The DICE framework was awarded a patent nine years later.
In 2013, Rich Lesser succeeded Bürkner as president and chief executive. During Lesser's tenure, BCG more than doubled in size to over 22,000 employees and tripled in revenue, primarily driven by its expansion into digital analytics and other new service offerings. In 2015, BCG began investing in its artificial intelligence business division. In 2017, BCG relocated its New York office to Hudson Yards. In 2015, BCG launched the BCG Henderson Institute in honor of founder Bruce Henderson. That same year, BCG supported the launch of B Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Eduardo Saverin and Raj Ganguly.
In May 2021, the firm elected Christoph Schweizer as CEO, replacing Rich Lesser. In September 2022, BCG reached a deal to acquire Quantis, an environmental consultancy group. Under the deal, Quantis would retain its brand and operate as a standalone business unit within BCG. In December 2022, the firm consolidated its technology divisions into a single unit, BCG X. By 2024, BCG X had around 3,000 employees and nearly 20 percent of BCG's revenue was driven by IT consulting.
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
Between October 2024 and May 2025 BCG helped design and run the business operations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which in turn has been linked to US-based private security firms, and is being investigated over the identity of its donors.
In June 2025, BCG terminated its contract with the GHF. It had said that the work was done "pro bono" but The Washington Post reported that BCG submitted invoices of over $1 million per month. BCG then fired two senior partners, calling the work they oversaw for GHF "unauthorized".
The two senior partners dismissed by BCG were Matt Schlueter and Ryan Ordway, both from the firm's U.S. defense and security practice, who did not disclose the full nature of their engagement and oversaw the GHF work without authorization.
It was later revealed by the Financial Times that BCG's work, codenamed Project Aurora, was more extensive than previously disclosed, covering more than $4 million of contracted work. It also included modeling work on the postwar reconstruction of Gaza, including cost estimates for giving hundreds of thousands of Gazans 'relocation packages' worth $9,000 per person in exchange for them leaving the territory.
Save the Children suspended its partnership with BCG as a result of BCG's work with the GHF and for "modelling a plan to forcibly relocate Palestinians from Gaza".
Gabe Winn, CEO and founder of Blakeney, emphasised in PR Week that it was not only a matter of failed communications, but rather BCG's culture.
From Wikipedia’s article on Boston Consulting Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5