Sagepartners: Value-Creating Growth

Sage Venture Development | Sage Strategic Leadership

Larry Bennigson
Director
Boston, US

One of the toughest challenges for any management team is to distinguish between the needs of the next generation of business and what brought success in the past. Whether it is a new or an established business, the leadership, processes, culture and organization needed are often different from the comfortable approaches of the past. And, existing assumptions about competition, markets and technologies can obscure recognition of new opportunities in a rapidly changing and uncertain future.

The odds of new business success can be improved by using processes that challenge the past to deliver new approaches, refreshed assumptions and creative action.”

Larry Bennigson is a Senior Fellow of Harvard Business School Executive Education. He oversees the growth of the school’s custom executive development services for individual companies and directs and teaches in some of the programs.

Larry has focused on growth, governance and organization since 1965. He has consulted extensively to companies in the US and Europe and has worked in Russia. He was President of the Scandinavian Institutes for Administrative Research in the U.S., a Managing Partner of The MAC Group, Senior Vice President of Gemini Consulting and has practiced as an independent management consultant. In the MAC Group he co-founded the practice in “Managing Strategic Change,” co-led the U.S. Industrial Practice, and directed the firm’s overall practice development. He has written numerous cases and articles and writes for, and serves on the Advisory Board of “Strategy and Leadership.”

He was Chairman of SBS Technologies, Inc., a NASDAQ company, at the time of its recent acquisition by GE. As an SBS Board Member he was Lead Director, chaired the Compensation and Management Development Committee and served on the Audit Committee. He was a Board and Audit Committee Member of the Central Maine Power Company and remained on the Advisory Board after their acquisition by Energy East. He worked with and served on the Advisory Board of Toffler Associates, the firm founded by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Bennigson is active on other Advisory Boards and is a past President and Chairman of the Project Management Institute.

Larry taught graduate students and executives on issues of operations and manufacturing strategy while on the faculties of the Harvard Business School, Stanford University School of Engineering, London Business School and GSB Lund University, Sweden.

He holds a B.S. General Engineering from UCLA, as well as Masters and Doctorate Degrees in Industrial Engineering (with specialization in Human Factors Engineering and Industrial Organization) from Stanford University. Prior to his teaching and consulting career, he served for six years in the US Navy where he competed in the 1960 Olympic Trials in the sport of crew, served on destroyers in the Pacific and taught Naval Science at Stanford University.