Alden became Chairman of the
Boston Company and the
Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company in 1969. During his tenure, to 1978, the company quadrupled its assets. Alden transformed the company from a somewhat local financial company into an international organization and attracted to its board of directors incredibly successful executives including the chief executive officers of
Armco Steel, TransWorld Airlines,
Continental Oil,
Royal Dutch Shell in the United Kingdom, the Dole Company in Hawaii and Lee Iacocca, the then president of
Ford. Alden and his associates developed new branches of the Boston Company including the
Boston Consulting Group, the Financial Strategies Group, Institutional Investors, Rinfret-Boston Economic Advisory Services, and an oil and gas investment subsidiary in Texas. These new entities allowed the Boston Company to expand outside of Massachusetts to acquire investment counseling firms across the United States. By the end of the 1970s the
Boston Company became the United States’ 15th largest investment-management firm. Alden was fascinated by organizations that were hired by incredibly wealthy families like the Rockefellers and the Fords to manage their assets. He recognized that similar assistance was needed by families less wealthy. He took this idea and transformed it into the Financial Strategies Group, an organization created to evaluate the assets of less wealthy families, offer advice on estate planning, manage resources, and enable them to invest. Among his first clients were John Glenn and George Webster. ==Influence in Japan==