Articles by William Cohen, Ph.D.

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 sticking to that code. He was very clear the personal integrity was a part of business integrity, and doing the right thing in business and professional life was immensely powerful for the individual and the...Full Article »

Would you like to come up with innovations that mark you as an extraordinary performer? I’m talking about innovators like Frederick Smith who thought up the idea behind FedEx while still in college, or Albert Einstein who developed the Theory of Relativity not while laboring before a computer or over complicated formulae on a blackboard, but while lying comfortably with his eyes closed on...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 rather in an environment that is unknown and unforeseeable. In Drucker’s own words, it allows an organization to be “purposefully...Full Article »

You can’t avoid failure completely because sometimes you’re going to make mistakes, or if not you, someone will make them for you. These kind of failures can be very valuable in that you will know what and what not to do and avoid similar situations in the future. However, there is one type of failure that can have a major impact. In fact, it can put you out of business. Yet it is...Full Article »

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. Ordinary managers simply took ideas developed in their own functional areas or industries and tried to make them better. This led to rather ordinary and very modest gains. Drucker said that the really big advances, which...Full Article »

Quality is a very necessary and important part of the product or service that you offer, whether the product is an automobile or an airplane, potential candidates for a job, or due diligence accomplished by a consultant, attorney, or accountant prior to an acquisition. Yet too many either don’t understand what quality is for their customer, or don’t know how to express it as an...Full Article »

I heard Peter say a lot of strange things when I was his student, but this has got to be one of the most unusual that I’d heard up to that time. I think most of my Drucker classmates agreed. Indeed, until Drucker came along most everyone believed the basic “fact” that the purpose of a business was to make money. That is, to make a profit. This belief leads to a corollary,...Full Article »

Years ago Peter Drucker wrote, "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Was Drucker being overly simplistic? Was he mistaken?  Was he denying pundits who for years have said that a business existed to make a...Full Article »

In 1978, James MacGregor Burns published his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Leadership . In it he classified leadership into the categories of transactional and transforming types. Transforming leadership was the preferred process in that it was more potent, engaged the full person of the follower, and leaders and followers stimulated each other to advance followers into leaders and might even...Full Article »

Adapted from A Class with Drucker (AMACOM, 2008). To Peter Drucker, management was more than a job, even more than a profession. It was a calling. From him I learned something that I have tried to express in all of my books, speeches, and articles: You don’t get ahead by fighting your way to the top – you get ahead by helping others to the top. You don’t succeed by trying to...Full Article »

Peter Drucker was the first to understand that the basis of success in any business rested on only two basic functions. I emphasize that Drucker referred to any business. That means any business or organization regardless of product or service. What are these two magic functions that are clearly so important?  Let’s look at Drucker’s thinking. Drucker’s Analysis Every...Full Article »