Peter Cohan is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 businessman, author, venture capitalist, and financier.

Education

Cohan earned a B.A.

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in art history

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 in 1979 and a B.S.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 in 1980 from Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

. He did graduate work in computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 and earned an MBA from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

The Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Wharton was the world’s first collegiate business school and the first business school in the United States...

.

Achievements

Prior to 1994, when he started Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm, Cohan worked for Index Systems, an information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 management consulting firm started by several MIT professors; and at The Monitor Company, a strategy consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...

 professor Michael E. Porter, an expert on competition and strategy.

Cohan is the author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 of ten books, including Export Now: Five Keys to Entering New Markets (Wiley, 2011), co-authored with Frank Lavin, Capital Rising (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), co-authored by U. Srinivasa Rangan, You Can't Order Change (Portfolio, 2009), Value Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2003) and Net Profit (Wiley, 2001). He has contributed to six compendium

Compendium

A compendium is a concise, yet comprehensive compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern some delimited field of human interest or endeavour , while a "universal" encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of...

s of modern management, blogs on AOL's DailyFinance, and edits a monthly investment-oriented newsletter. He has taught at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, MIT, the University of Hong Kong and since May 2002 has been an executive-in-residence at Babson College

Babson College

Babson College is a private business school located in Wellesley, Massachusetts near Boston.- History :Babson College was founded by Roger Babson on September 3, 1919, as the Babson Institute. It was renamed "Babson College" in 1969...

 in Wellesley, Massachusetts

Wellesley, Massachusetts

Wellesley is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of Greater Boston. The population was 27,982 at the time of the 2010 census.It is best known as the home of Wellesley College and Babson College...

. Since September 2005, he has taught business strategy to undergraduate and MBA students at Babson.

From September 2004 to September 2008, Cohan served on the board of the Alzheimer's Association

Alzheimer's Association

The Alzheimer's Association, incorporated on April 10, 1980 as the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association, Inc., is a non-profit American voluntary health organization which focuses on care, support and research for Alzheimer's disease....

, Massachusetts Chapter.

He has appeared as a guest on ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

's Good Morning America

Good Morning America

Good Morning America is an American morning news and talk show that is broadcast on the ABC television network; it debuted on November 3, 1975. The weekday program airs for two hours; a third hour aired between 2007 and 2008 exclusively on ABC News Now...

, CBS's Early Show and Evening News, CNN

CNN

Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

, and CNBC

CNBC

CNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...

 and has been quoted in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

, The Washington Post

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, TIME

Time

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....

, Fortune

Fortune (magazine)

Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...

, and Business Week.

Cohan writes online columns for Forbes and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and is a member of the Wharton Blog Network.

He is the brother of William D. Cohan

William D. Cohan

William D. Cohan is a contributing editor at Fortune, and award-winning former investigative newspaper reporter based in Raleigh, North Carolina, who worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase....

.