George Bennett

For more than 40 years, George Bennett has been a successful serial entrepreneur. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from West Virginia University in 1967 and MS and PhD degrees in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University in 1970 and 1971, he joined the Boston Consulting Group.

Then, in 1973 he co-founded Bain and Company and in 1976 co-founded Braxton Associates, two very highly regarded international strategy consulting firms. Later, he co-founded Symmetrix, a management consulting firm that specialized in helping large firms translate innovative strategies into cost effective operating practices. In 1997 he co-founded Health Dialog, an international health care services company that provided on-call and on-line services to over 24,000,000 individuals and was sold in 2008 to Bupa, a large British not-for-profit enterprise dedicated to improving world health.

Bennett spent a year in Washington in the early 1980s as a member of the Grace Commission, a commission created by President Ronald Reagan (and headed by Reagan’s Democratic friend Peter Grace) to bring state-of-the-art business practices to the federal government. Bennett has remained active in Washington and has been an active participant in the ongoing debate regarding health reform. In 2010 the West Virginia University Alumni Association inducted Bennett into its Academy of Distinguished Alumni and in 2011 he received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the WVU College of Engineering. Bennett serves (or has served) on the board of directors of a number of organizations, including the Population Health Alliance, Health Forum (a for-profit division of the American Hospital Association), the National Youth Science Foundation, and Urban Improv, a Boston based not-for-profit organization focused on “improving the odds” for Boston’s inner city youth. Bennett has four children and six grandchildren, all of whom live in the Boston area. He and his wife, Mimi, live in Brookline, Massachusetts.