Joseph Farrell (1935-2011) / cinema analytics pioneer

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|January 3, 2012

History reveals numerous examples of how blind influential executives and managers can be to breakthrough advances in their industry. For example, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had a dramatic rise and fall due to blindness and perhaps resistance to change. DEC was an entrepreneurial computer company that grew to $14 billion in sales and employed an [...]

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Charles T. Horngren (1926-2011) / accounting professor

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|November 8, 2011

You might think that management accounting is one of the drier and possibly boring courses in a business school curriculum, but it is a vibrant field with current debates about which methodologies to measure profitability and costs and also how to apply them in decision making. One of the key [...]

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Eli Goldratt (1947 – 2011) / Theory of Constraints Guru

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|June 21, 2011

As some of my regular blog readers of the last four years know, I occasionally devote a blog as an obituary to someone who influenced my life. This blog will be one of those. I suspect that very few of you are familiar with Eli Goldratt. He passed away last [...]

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David Warren (1925-2010) – Do Companies Need his “Black Box”?

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|July 27, 2010

David Warren, the inventor of the prototype of the airplane flight recorder “black box”, passed away in July, 2010. An Australian, he was inspired by the death of his father from a plane crash. His device accomplished his objective: to simultaneously record the conversations of pilots and instrument readings. Do [...]

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C. K. Prahalad (1941-2010) – Core Competencies and Business Analytics

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 4, 2010

The recent death of C. K. Prahalad, a proponent of that organizations should build core competencies, is a sad loss. He was the co-author with Gary Hamel of the book Competing for the Future. His message was that a core competency is a specific factor that a business sees as [...]

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Advocate of Analytics – Economist Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009)

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|December 21, 2009

The death of Paul A. Samuelson, the first America Nobel Laureate in economics, is a sad but expected loss. He was 94. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with converting the field of economics from one that ponders theory about behaviors unintelligible to the common person [...]

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What do I want my Epitaph and Legacy to Be?

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|December 15, 2008

Have you ever played around with the self-improvement exercise of writing your own obituary or epitaph? It is intended to give you a broader perspective of the meaning of your life. I fear that someone will write my epitaph as: “Here lies Gary Cokins, who died a failure because his [...]

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