New BCG partners: Anita Oh, Ben Keneally and Gemma Henderson
Management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has made three high-profile appointments in its Australia practice. Ben Keneally, Anita Oh and Gemma Henderson have all been promoted to Partner, taking the firm’s leadership tally across Australia and New Zealand to 44 Partners.
Keneally has an academic background in Law and began his professional career at Boston Consulting Group in 1994. He spent nearly a decade at the firm, ascending to the role of Principal before departing to work as an Executive Director at Housing NSW. Having held a number of high positions at various firms, he rejoined BCG in 2017. Keneally works closely with the healthcare sector and has been working to devise improvements in the public and private domains
Anita Oh has a background in International Business and Law, and began her professional career as a stock trader before joining global management consultancy McKinsey & Company as a Business Analyst in 2001. After a four-year stint at Fairfax Media, she joined BCG as a Consultant in 2007, and has since risen through the ranks to the role of Partner. Oh works closely with clients in the energy sector.
Henderson holds an MBA from INSEAD, and also began her professional career at BCG as an Associate. She left the firm as a Senior Associate in 2004 to briefly work in the public sector, before rejoining BCG as a Consultant in 2006. She has since been promoted to project Leader, and will now take on her new Partner Role. Her expertise lies primarily in public sector projects.
The appointments come at a time when BCG is thriving in Australia and New Zealand. The US-origin strategy consultancy boosted its revenues by over one third to nearly $400 million. “Growth was strong across all our practice areas last year, where usually there is some cyclicality, or a portfolio of slower and faster-growing areas that balance each other out,” commented Managing Partner at BCG Australia Anthony Roediger.
The new Partners appear to be well-versed with their departments, and have a grip on some of the issues tackling the industry. Keneally, for instance, asserts that more data could be analysed to help tackle issues in the healthcare sector. “Very little data is used at the front line to improve the delivery of care and to help clinical teams continuously improve their performance,” he told Edmund Tadros from Australian Financial Review (AFR).
Oh, meanwhile, highlighted the unique position that the energy sector currently finds itself in, as companies try to “simultaneously solve for affordability, sustainability, reliability,” she told AFR. “We've been hearing from business that certainty is critical. Businesses feel they could do with more of it from government because they are making more conservative choices they need to buffer for the risk of different policy outcomes,” she added.
Work-life balance
Working in the top tier of management consulting – BCG is together with arch-rivals McKinsey and Bain one of the globe’s leading boardroom advisors – is notorious for its long and hectic work schedules. Reflecting on how she managed to balance her work with personal life, Oh said: “I had to figure out how to make my home life and work life operate together. It's constant readjustments. I do like to push myself to the limit and beyond. I like being uncomfortable. But over the years I've learnt how to recharge. To stop. So I’ll do things like paint, meditate.”
Keneally highlighted that he even injects consulting skills into his family life. “It's not enough to just set goals for yourself in your career and your work life. You need to set numerical quantitative targets for family goals.”
