The Fractal Company
Welcome to The Fractal Company website—a digital hub where you can find conversation-starting blogs, deeply researched articles and reports, and a regularly updated e-book on the future of business.
We are two former partners of Boston Consulting Group: Hans-Paul Bürkner is BCG Global Chair Emeritus, having served as BCG’s first European CEO and Chair from 2004-2021, and Arindam Bhattacharya is a BCG senior advisor, having among other things served as the leader of BCG’s India business.
For the past 20 years and more, we have been researching globalization, global business and how companies—big and small—have been seeking new ways to build competitive advantage. More recently, over the past five years, we have worked with Simon Targett, a former Associate Editor of the Financial Times, on a series of reports and articles published by Boston Consulting Group and Fortune magazine.
These paid particular attention to the disruptive geopolitical, digital, and technological forces transforming the competitive landscape. It is clear that we are living in a fragmenting world. Not a day goes by when there is not some new sign that the world we have come to know over the past fifty and more years is changing—and changing fast.
This has big implications for leaders. As the world economy integrated and globalized in the second half of last century, big companies triumphed by reaping the benefits of greater efficiency from building big factories, maintaining vast workforces, and doing business in many markets.
But now, in an era of growing geopolitical and market fragmentation, the traditional advantages of scale are eroding. In fact, scale is becoming a distinct disadvantage. That much is clear from the rising number of startup and “subscale” companies that are competing with their larger rivals in a variety of business sectors.
These companies are deploying what we call “fractal” strategies.
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Customizing their business for individual markets, driving market share and profitable growth through a higher degree of attention to the local context
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Looking beyond their core profit centers and tapping the new fast-growing revenue pools collecting at the customer-facing edge of their businesses
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Shifting away from big data and toward the smart-data capabilities of AI-powered learning models to draw insights from local, fragmentary, incomplete data.
In the next few years, every leader of every company in every sector will need to find new ways to exploit scale and build what we call “fractal advantage”.
It is to help leaders navigate these tricky times that we have launched The Fractal Company.
To be clear, it’s not a company—it’s a thought leadership initiative. As well as this website, we have an e-book (that will be regularly updated as we conduct further research), a bi-weekly (and sometimes weekly) blog on Substack, and a series of articles.
Over time, we plan to publish blogs and commentaries written not only by us but also by other people who have interesting views, insights and perspectives on what we consider to be one of the most important—urgent—topics on the CEO agenda.
After all, we’re talking about the future of the corporation as we know it.
