Ed Cohen

Build High-Performing Teams for Extraordinary Business Results Imagine a workplace where team members not only excel individually but thrive collectively—where collaboration is an expectation deeply ingrained in a culture that drives success. That’s the goal of transformational people leader and team-building expert Ed Cohen and his expert contributors—Rahul Andrews, Nandini Darsi, Emily King Grandinetta, Sheina Laws, Priscilla Nelson, and Anil Santhapuri. Transforming Teams is a method and mindset that puts trust, collaboration, and cultural intelligence at the heart of team success. Cohen and his colleagues have spent the last 25 years developing this six-phase approach for building relationship-centered organizations. This framework has been tested and proven to work in more than 150 global organizations—from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Western Union, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Organization leaders, TD and HR professionals, and coaches who want to foster business cultures in which people feel connected to their work and one another will find this book invaluable. You’ll learn to break through conflicts, reduce turnover, increase engagement, and overcome dysfunction by aligning team behaviors with shared values and strategic goals. Use the real-world case studies and practical tools to transform your teams and drive success no matter your organization’s size or industry.

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease-a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease-a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

Talk on the Wilde Side focuses on the formation of a new `type' of sexual category in the newpaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, relating this to middle-class discussions of masculinity throughout the nineteenth century.

Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years “immunity,” a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. “Self-defense” also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first “natural right.” In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one, creating a new vital function, “immunity-as-defense.” In A Body Worth Defending, Ed Cohen reveals the unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical assumptions about the human body that biomedicine incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the vulnerable living organism. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

Talk on the Wilde Side focuses on the formation of a new `type' of sexual category in the newpaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, relating this to middle-class discussions of masculinity throughout the nineteenth century.