Success Quote by Bruce Henderson

Henderson strips business strategy down to its most uncomfortable premise: advantage is not a group project. In one clean sentence, he rejects the feel-good language of “value creation” and “win-win” that companies use to launder competitive aggression into something polite. The objective isn’t to be good, or even to be better; it’s to expand the territory in which you get to dictate terms. And because markets are finite, that expansion almost always requires pushing someone else back.

The phrasing matters. “Enlarge the scope” is technocratic, almost bloodless, a consultant’s way of describing conquest without saying conquest. “Which can only happen” turns a choice into an inevitability, a subtle moral alibi: don’t blame the firm for playing the game; blame the game for being zero-sum. The kicker, “at someone else’s expense,” is the sentence’s confession and threat. Henderson isn’t warning you off; he’s reminding you to stop pretending.

Context helps. As a founder of Boston Consulting Group, Henderson helped popularize frameworks like the experience curve and portfolio thinking, tools that encouraged companies to chase scale, cost advantages, and market share leadership. In that worldview, competitors aren’t peers; they’re costs waiting to be reduced, acquired, or starved.

The subtext is a critique of managerial sentimentality: if you’re not taking, you’re being taken. It’s also a quiet instruction on power. “Advantage” isn’t just efficiency; it’s leverage over suppliers, labor, regulators, and customers. Henderson’s realism is bracing, but it’s also revealing: once you accept his premise, ethics becomes an external constraint, not an internal aim.