Superconnectors can even be prickly and difficult. For me, the best example of this is a man who was routinely avoided by his colleagues, yet was one of the most effective and significant superconnectors I have ever met.
Bruce Doolin Henderson was born on a Tennessee farm in 1915 and sold Bibles as a summer job. After studying engineering and business, he worked for eighteen years at the Westinghouse Corporation, where he became the second-youngest vice-president in the company’s history. In 1953, President Eisenhower chose Bruce as part of a five-member team to evaluate the Marshall Plan in Germany, which was odd, considering that Bruce spoke no foreign languages and had no connections there. Despite his early promise, Bruce didn’t make it to the very top of Westinghouse, and he quit in 1959 to join consulting firm Arthur D. Little. Four years later, he left that post too–rumour says he was fired. At the age of forty-eight, his career looked largely over.
Then fate gave Bruce his break. He was encouraged to start a consulting department within the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. This department originally comprised just himself; he didn’t even have a secretary. By 1967 Bruce had renamed his outfit the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), but it was still a very small operation. Then he sold a project to a timber company in Tacoma, and needed to recruit some temporary help to undertake the assignment. This came in the form of Alan Zakon, a teacher at Boston University, who recounted the call he received from Bruce:
‘This is Bruce Henderson. I’d like you to do some consulting for me.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘What do you charge?’
At the time I would have worked for fourteen dollars, but…I went for what I thought was a huge fee in those days: ‘I charge one hundred and twenty-five dollars a day.’
‘Wrong, too much,’ he shouted. ‘Take your annual income and divide it by three hundred and sixty-five, multiply by four and add twenty-two.’
‘Mr Henderson,’ I said, ‘if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t need to do outside consulting.’
There was dead silence…
‘I’ll pay you a hundred bucks. Come down tomorrow.’
24
From this inauspicious beginning, Henderson’s firm became one of the two most prestigious consulting firms in the world, with more than 60 offices all over the globe, 7000 staff, and revenues of around 2.5 billion dollars. Clearly, Bruce connected a lot of clients with a lot of consultants, some in exotic locations, which alone would make him a master superconnector. In 1992, when he died, the Financial Times said: ‘Few people have had as much impact on international business in the second half of the twentieth century.’ But, for me, Bruce is a stellar superconnector because he linked the world of business with academia, including thinkers in the business schools, and funnelled a large number of top graduates from liberal arts backgrounds into consulting and business. He hired some of the best professors in Boston and forced them to think about business in a way that nobody else had done before, resulting in such insights as the growth–share matrix and the huge value of being the leader in a high-growth market. He built a close alliance between Harvard Business School and BCG, recruiting some of the best professors and alumni. He started the practice whereby top consulting firms would take on not just MBAs but interns in their senior year of college and graduates, whether they were scientists, historians or English majors.
Yet, Bruce has to be the most contrary and difficult connector to feature in this book. When he came to visit the BCG office where I was working, one of the vice-presidents told me, ‘Don’t have anything to do with him. He can only do your career harm, never good.’
Later, I attended a client conference with Bruce at Chewton Glen, a delightful country house hotel set in Hampshire’s New Forest. I thought the event went very well. But afterwards Bruce berated all of us for the staleness of the presentations. ‘I was saying all this stuff three years ago,’ he declaimed, as if an Ice Age had since intervened. ‘Haven’t we learned anything new since then?’
At his memorial service, the first speaker was Seymour (‘Sy’) Tilles, a BCG veteran and former Harvard Business School professor, who was my boss in the late 1970s. Sy quickly got to the point:
At BCG, ‘founding father’ is decidedly in the singular, for in the beginning there was Bruce Henderson. Of course, after the beginning there was also Bruce.
He was not always easy to deal with. My vivid recollection of those early days is that periodically some brilliant young person would come into my office and say, ‘Do you know what he did to me?’ It was never necessary to ask to whom they were referring.
The third speaker at the service was George Stalk, who joined BCG in 1978 and is still there today. ‘He was physically and intellectually imposing,’ George told the congregation, ‘and I feared him greatly…I struggled to avoid him in the office.’
The final witness was John Clarkeson, BCG’s chief executive officer at the time of the memorial service. He was hired, he said, during a period in BCG’s history which ‘Bruce often referred to…as “when we couldn’t hire anybody”. I expect many felt the need to resist the power of his influence, but everyone who came near him had the trajectory of their career changed. Some, I’m sure, in ways they could not have imagined.’
Bruce connected people whether they liked it or not. It was lonely work, but it made the world smaller and richer.
The heroic work of superconnectors who connect dissimilar worlds can be fully appreciated only if we reflect on what would happen if they did not exist. The natural tendency is to mix with people like us–we are more relaxed with people we know than with strangers, and less comfortable with folks from unfamiliar cultures and backgrounds. There is a natural human instinct to favour our in-group and ignore or even stigmatise groups that are beyond our experience. The great economist Thomas Schelling showed in 1978 that the consequences of this can be highly divisive, even when the preference for our own kind is mild and people are tolerant.25 Using a chessboard as an illustration, he showed how two different kinds of people in a city could initially be pretty mixed up and yet over time become segregated. Schelling’s model works for any two groups of people, businesses or places that are not natural bedfellows: black and white people, Shias and Sunnis, young and old, beautiful people and the rest of us; or churches and brothels, motor supply stores and high-end boutiques, hospitals and night-clubs. Schelling did not assume that any of the people involved were prejudiced against the other group, but simply that anyone would feel isolated and uncomfortable if most of their neighbours were dissimilar.
Taking the case of black and white people, Schelling’s model had the following rules: someone with one neighbour will try to move if that neighbour is a different colour; someone with two neighbours will want at least one of them to be the same colour; and someone with three to five neighbours will want at least two of them to be the same. Now, these preferences are not incompatible with an integrated town. Schelling used his chessboard to represent sixty people, half black and half white, leaving four spaces free at the edges of the board (a chessboard comprises eight by eight spaces). He set up the black and white chess pieces in such a way that, according to his rules, everyone was happy yet also integrated.