Lords of Strategy

4.

Loading the Matrix

ALMOST EVERYONE AT BCG in the late 1960s and early 1970s recalls the 8 a.m. Monday staff meetings as formative, heady, and, for some, bordering on intoxicating. Whoever was in Boston—usually a good-sized crew; by 1970, the professional staff there numbered nearly eighty-five—would get together to listen to colleagues presenting their latest casework. Hypotheses would be floated, tested, prodded, and poked. Ideas would emerge and be batted around the room. Around 8:30, Henderson would arrive—that’s when his train got in from the suburbs—and “rip everything up,” as one participant recalls, asking still more questions, contentiously probing for better explanations.

The excitement that people who were there still register about ...