Success Quote by Bruce Henderson

Strategy, for Henderson, isn’t a master plan so much as a weaponized asymmetry. The line is doing quiet demolition work on the idea that “best practices” win. If competitors all benchmark the same KPIs, hire the same talent profiles, copy the same playbooks, and chase the same customers with the same pricing logic, then the battlefield becomes a mirror maze: lots of motion, little advantage. Henderson’s insistence that success “derives” from differences is a provocation aimed squarely at managerial comfort. He’s arguing that the source of profit isn’t competence in the abstract; it’s being competent in ways others are not, and can’t easily become.

The subtext is behavioral. Differences only matter if they force different choices: what you refuse to do, what you can do faster, what you can do cheaper, what you can do at all. That “consequent difference in their behavior” line is the tell. Henderson is warning against cosmetic uniqueness (branding, slogans, mission statements) that doesn’t alter the actual decision calculus. If your incentives, cost structure, and operating model push you to act like everyone else, you are everyone else.

Context matters: Henderson helped found BCG and shaped modern competitive strategy in an era when conglomerates, scale economics, and experience curves were rewriting corporate life. He’s speaking from a world where competitors converged quickly, and where the real edge came from structural advantages that compounded over time. The quote is less about outsmarting rivals in a single move than about designing a system that makes you behave differently by default - and makes that difference hard to copy.