Ed Satell

Ed Satell founded American Future Systems (AFS), the parent company of Progressive Business Publications, in 1959. AFS was a distribution and finance company specializing in the sale of high-end cookware and china. From the beginning, Ed was committed to high-quality products and services. And he stressed development of people - a characteristic vital to PBP's recent successes in the publishing industry.

Throughout the 1960s, the company trained thousands of young people to sell its products and services. Many of these young people went on to become prominent in a variety of endeavors. Because of the company's emphasis on personal development, acceptance of responsibility for results and high standards, many found this early impressionable experience to be a central factor in their success. Among the many sales and training offices AFS opened throughout the U.S. was one in New York's Harlem. An early recruit in that office was Franklin Thomas, who later went on to law school and later became president of the Ford Foundation.

Another notable individual whose early career was strongly influenced by American Future Systems was Rosabeth Moss Kanter, former editor of the Harvard Business Review.

Ed is a classic entrepreneur, a business pragmatist with a keen sense of markets and a knack for developing people. During the 1960s and `70s, he was an avid student of the human potential movement. He participated in the work of many top thinkers who were gaining the know-how to help people eliminate barriers to success and achieve their true potential.

Ed was also a very active member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and, later, World Presidents Organization (WPO). There he gained exposure to innovative ideas as well as top executives who were implementing those ideas in a variety of fields.

In the late 1980s, Ed was encouraged by some people with experience in the field to launch his first newsletter - one for sales executives called The Selling Advantage. Newsletter publishing was an ideal business for someone with his background and training. A voracious reader and deep conceptual thinker about what makes companies successful, Ed quickly learned that he could add valuable pragmatic insight to the editorial content of the newsletter, partly by writing portions of it himself.

The publication took off. In less than two years it had 40,000 readers and was a blockbuster success.

"Although the first year was real learning experience for us," Ed recalls, "we came to understand there was a significant business need that was inadequately filled. We learned that executives need to get information quickly and that fast-read was going to be the key to our success. We also understood that information in itself has no value. It has to be actionable to really make a business difference. And finally, it became clear that practitioners demand the voice of an expert rather than a jack-of-all-trades journalist, which meant that to earn credibility in the marketplace, our writers had to gain deep knowledge of their fields."

Accordingly, two of PBP's tenets for launching subsequent newsletters were: 1) Find an expert in the field, teach that person PBP's unique editorial values, and build the publication around that editor's expertise; 2) support the launch with extraordinary marketing.

Ed played a hands-on role in PBP's early launches, overseeing editorial, marketing and operations while developing key people. In recent years, however, he's delegated those duties to his management team. Today, Ed's primary role is to provide the strategic vision for the company's future and to find new avenues for growth.

Ed is also a very strong believer in giving back to the community and he's active in a variety of philanthropic activities. This dedication and commitment to philanthropy recently was recognized by the Greater Philadelphia Area Association of Fundraising Professionals, which named him "Individual Philanthropist of the Year".