Articles by William Cohen, Ph.D.

Want to predict future trends that will impact your business? It’s not as difficult as it seems if you know a few essentials. Columnist William Cohen looks at how shifts in demographics have predictable outcomes and represent a major opportunity for those who have the desire and know-how to do the analysis and take advantage of it. Most Americans were appalled in the 1960’s when...Full Article »

Market Research Showed that Personal Home Computing Was a Terrible Idea Trying to create a new process from scratch but not sure how it will be received? Remember that when you’re introducing new product, process or idea, that it’s not you who ultimately defines it. It is the potential customer or user. Columnist Dr. William Cohen describers how you can use something called...Full Article »

Why Strategy Is More Important Than Tactics Your company's sales are through the roof, marketing's throwing money at getting even more sales and everyone's making their numbers. However, if the overarching strategy isn't right, beware the law of unintended consequences, says columnist Willian Cohen. Here's how high sales might be concealing major problems.  ...Full Article »

Got a sucessful product or line of business? Even if your profits are strong you might want to consider getting rid of them. Here's why. In 1981, Jack Welch began his twenty year tenure as CEO of General Electric and his legend as one of the leading CEOs of the 20 th century. He was also the youngest CEO in GE’s history and the greatest of both sales and profit increases came...Full Article »

You can make many mistakes which will be forgiven by others inside and customers and the government outside of your organization . But they won't forgive a lack of integrity, writes columnist William Cohen. Integrity can mean a lot of different things to different people, but Drucker simplified it to a single sentence --- it means adhering to a code of ethics and doing the right thing by...Full Article »

Drucker defined innovation as “the design and development of something new, as yet unknown and not in existence, which will establish a new economic configuration of the old, know existing elements,” writes columnist William Cohen. But sometimes businesses simply overlook innovations that are right under their noses. Peter Drucker wrote that any business organization had...Full Article »

Would you like to come up with innovations that mark you as an extraordinary performer? In this month's column, Dr. William Cohen, explains how. Frederick Smith thought up the idea behind FedEx while still in college and Albert Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity not while laboring before a computer or over complicated formulae on a blackboard, but while lying comfortably with his...Full Article »

Drucker wrote that the purpose of strategy is to enable an organization to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable environment. So contrary to what many believe, strategy is not about achieving results in a known and foreseeable environment, but an environment that is unknown and unforeseeable. In Drucker’s own words, it allows an organization to be “purposefully...Full Article »

Are the huge salaries and short tenures of those at the tops of our organizations evidence of misguided devotion to the management “profession”? William Cohen explores why professionalism isn't always a good thing. More than fifty years ago Drucker reported on the allegory of the three stonecutters. According to Drucker, these three workers were...Full Article »

You can’t avoid failure completely because sometimes you’re going to make mistakes, and if not you, someone will make them for you, says contributor Willian Cohen.  Some failures are in fact very valuable to help you avoid similar future situations. However, there is one entirely avoidable type of failure that can put you out of business. Here's how to spot...Full Article »

Leadership is essentially a marketing job, argues Dr. William Cohen in this week's Lessons from Peter Drucker. Here are the eight universal laws of sucessful leadership and why they're all about marketing. Drucker was fond of pointing out that the greatest advances in management came from taking ideas from a completely different field and applying them to the manager’s own....Full Article »