Tom Osenton

Thomas George "Tom" Osenton (b. April 9, 1953 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American economist, publisher, educator and author. Osenton spent a quarter century in media including stints in television and consumer magazines. At the age of 36, he was named President, CEO and Publisher of The Sporting News Publishing Company - the world's oldest sportsweekly - where he transformed the century-old property into a contemporary communications company.
Before joining The Sporting News, Osenton was publisher of American Artist magazine, which today is part of Dutch publishing giant VNU. Prior to his work in magazine publishing, he held a variety of positions at the ABC Television Network in New York, primarily focusing on the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and Summer Olympics in Los Angeles as network spokesperson. Previously, Osenton had served as Press Chief for ice hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid and directed the press operations for the tournament which resulted in the 1980 U.S. Hockey team's Gold medal Miracle on Ice.
Osenton is credited with the introduction of the controversial economic theory of innovation saturation in his 2004 book The Death of Demand: Finding Growth in a Saturated Global Economy (Financial Times Prentice Hall), which posits that all products and services - and therefore all companies - experience two major growth trends in its life - an "uptrend", during which revenue and/or units grow at ever-increasing rates, followed by a "downtrend", during which revenue and/or units grow at ever-decreasing rates thereafter. It is this theory, according to Osenton, that explains why cost-reductions in the form of "re-engineering" appeared for the first time ever in the mid-1980s in the U.S. at precisely the same time that the rate of revenue growth of dozens of maturing blue chip corporations (General Motors, Procter & Gamble, IBM, etc.) started to grow at ever-decreasing rates.
Osenton is also author of two other highly regarded business school textbooks: Customer Share Marketing (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2002) - one of the very few textbooks focusing on the marketing discipline of retention - and more recently, Boomer Destiny: Leading the U.S. Through the Worst Crisis Since the Great Depression (Praeger Publishers, 2009) - a sociology text that details the role of the Baby Boomer generation in both helping to cause the post-war expansion Boom in the U.S. as well as in managing through the new millennium bust and onto another expansion.
He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, Brookline High School and Phillips Exeter Academy.

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