Compare methods

	BCG Growth-Share Matrix	Diversification-Performance Analysis (Rumelt Categories)
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1977	1974
Originator	Bruce D. Henderson (Boston Consulting Group); Barry Hedley	Richard P. Rumelt; Krishna Palepu
Type	Portfolio-classification pipeline for resource allocation	Classification-and-comparison pipeline relating diversification type to firm performance
Seminal source	Hedley, B. (1977). Strategy and the 'Business Portfolio'. Long Range Planning, 10(1), 9-15.	Rumelt, R. P. (1974). Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance. Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. ISBN: 9780875841090
Aliases	Boston Box, Growth-Share Matrix, Boston Consulting Group Matrix, Product Portfolio Matrix	Rumelt Diversification Category Analysis, Related vs Unrelated Diversification Analysis, Corporate Diversification Strategy Classification, Diversification Strategy-Performance Linkage
Related	4	3
Summary	The BCG growth-share matrix is a portfolio-analysis tool that classifies a diversified company's business units on two axes — the growth rate of their market and their market share relative to the largest competitor — and uses that classification to guide cash allocation across the portfolio. Devised by Bruce Henderson at the Boston Consulting Group around 1970, it rests on two ideas BCG had developed: that cash generation rises with relative market share (via the experience curve) and that cash consumption rises with market growth. The familiar four-quadrant scheme — stars, cash cows, question marks (problem children), and dogs — was popularized and operationalized by Barry Hedley's 1977 Long Range Planning article, while Hax and Majluf's 1983 Interfaces paper subjected the matrix to critical analysis and refinement. It became the archetypal corporate portfolio framework of the 1970s and 1980s.	Diversification-performance analysis asks whether the kind of diversification a firm pursues — staying focused, expanding into related businesses, or building an unrelated conglomerate — is systematically associated with how well the firm performs. The categorical version originates with Rumelt's 1974 Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance, which classified diversified firms by specialization and relatedness ratios into single-business, dominant-business, related, and unrelated types and found that related diversifiers tended to outperform unrelated ones. Palepu's 1985 study reframed diversification with the continuous Jacquemin-Berry entropy measure, again finding that related diversification was associated with superior profit growth, and showed how the index approach and Rumelt's categorical method can be combined to gain both objectivity and conceptual richness.