Just Run It!: Running an Exceptional Business Is Easier Than You Think

6

Chapter 6

The Theory of Renewal

In the late 1960s, Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, offered a theory for the evolution of businesses in his celebrated discussion of the product life cycle. It has been an anchor point for business thinking ever since. Henderson postulated that businesses, like biological organisms, track inevitably through a four-part life cycle.

Of the millions of ideas for new businesses every year, only a very few make it out of what Henderson called the embryonic, or concept and development, stage. Like frog eggs, where only one in a thousand or so ever emerges as a tadpole, most new business ideas ...