Drucker Centennial Celebration

Published on Monday, November 10, 2008

Source: The Drucker School

Visit the centennial website at www.drucker100.com

Claremont, California—The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, along with the Drucker Institute, announced that Rick Warren and Minglo Shao have been added as chairs of the Drucker Centennial.

The Drucker Centennial will mark the 100th birthday of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management; author of 39 books on organizational behavior, innovation, economy, and society; and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This commemoration and celebration will be crowned by a week of special events at Claremont Graduate University in November 2009 and supplemented by other activities from Fall 2008-2010.

“We are grateful for the active participation of Rick Warren and Minglo Shao in guiding the Drucker Centennial and helping us to celebrate Peter’s 100th birthday,” said Ira Jackson, dean of the Drucker School. “These men are two of the world’s most extraordinary leaders. In giving back to the institutions named for Peter Drucker, who had such a profound influence on their own lives, they are helping to ensure that Peter’s legacy and insights are made relevant for the next century as well, and that Peter’s message gains deep roots and global reach.”

Warren is the pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. It is widely considered one of America’s most influential churches, with about 20,000 people attending weekend services. Warren is the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the best-selling hardback book in American history, with more than 30 million copies sold worldwide. Next week, he will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration.

Warren counted Peter Drucker as an important mentor. “His book The Effective Executive is a favorite I re-read every year,” Warren has said. “Long before words like ‘empowerment’” became popular, Peter was telling us that the secret of achieving results is to focus on your strengths, and the strengths of those you work with, rather than focusing on weaknesses.”

Shao, a member of the Drucker Institute Board of Advisors, is the founder and chairman of Bright China Holding Ltd., an investment group that operates in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and major cities around China. Under his leadership, Bright China Group has invested more than $500 million in China, providing employment to more than 10,000 laid-off workers in more than 20 cities.

Donations have also been made in Shannxi to build and operate schools, providing educational opportunities to more than 3,000 students from poverty-stricken farming families in the region.?
Through Bright China Holding, Shao heads the Peter F. Drucker Academy, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to researching and teaching Drucker’s management ideas in China. With a dozen locations across the country, thousands of middle and senior managers complete the Drucker Academy’s certificate program each year.

“We are extremely proud to have Rick Warren and Minglo Shao add their support to the Centennial,” said Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute, a campus-wide resource of CGU. “They certainly fit right in with an incredibly illustrious group of Centennial chairs.” They include:

• John Bachmann, Senior Partner at Edward Jones, Chairman, the Drucker School Board of Visitors and CGU Trustee
• Warren Bennis, University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern California
• Bob Buford, Author, Social Entrepreneur and Chairman of the Drucker Institute
• John Byrne, Executive Editor, BusinessWeek
• Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great and Built to Last
• Doris Drucker, Author and Inventor
• Rajiv Dutta, Drucker MBA '82 and Former President of eBay Marketplaces
• David Gergen, Director of Harvard University's Center for Public Leadership, CNN Commentator and Former White House Advisor
• Charles Handy, Author of The Age of Unreason and The Elephant and the Flea and Co-Founder of the London Business School
• Frances Hesselbein, Chairman, Leader to Leader Institute, Former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Masatoshi Ito, Founder and Honorary Chairman, the Ito-Yokado Group
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University
• Alan Khazei, CEO, Be The Change Inc. and Co-founder of City Year
• Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO, Teach for America
• A.G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO, Procter & Gamble Co.

Among the activities being planned for the Centennial are a one-day summit with corporate leaders on “The Drucker CEO of the 21st Century”; a Drucker Centennial Public Lecture Series, to be held in conjunction with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles; a series of onstage conversations between Rajiv Dutta and senior executives on “Managing in the 21st Century”; a Centennial marketing symposium that will showcase Drucker’s pioneering contributions to the field; and the production of a new text, “The Drucker Difference,” by Drucker School faculty.

Also planned as part of the Centennial is the launch of a major community-service project in the Inland Empire by CGU students; the premiere of the Drucker Institute documentary “Closing the Responsibility Gap”; a doubling around the world of the number of Drucker Societies-all-volunteer groups that use Drucker’s teachings to bring about positive change in their communities; and a major conference devoted to Drucker’s concept of “management as a liberal art.”

About Peter Drucker

Born in Vienna on November 19, 1909, Drucker had a profound impact on how people around the world organize themselves in the realms of business, government, and civil society. Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric Co., has hailed Drucker as “the greatest management thinker of the last century.” James O’Toole, Distinguished Professor at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, put it like this: “It is frustratingly difficult to cite a significant modern management concept that was not first articulated, if not invented, by Drucker.”

Drucker Centennial Events

Among the activities being planned for the Centennial are a one-day summit with corporate leaders on “The Drucker CEO of the 21st Century”; a Drucker Centennial Public Lecture Series, to be held in conjunction with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles; a series of onstage conversations between Rajiv Dutta and senior executives on “Managing in the 21st Century”; a Centennial marketing symposium that will showcase Drucker’s pioneering contributions to the field; and the production of a new text, “The Drucker Difference,” by Drucker School faculty.

Also planned as part of the Centennial is the launch of a major community-service project in the Inland Empire by CGU students; the premiere of the Drucker Institute documentary “Closing the Responsibility Gap”; a doubling around the world of the number of Drucker Societies—all-volunteer groups that use Drucker’s teachings to bring about positive change in their communities; and a major conference devoted to Drucker’s concept of “management as a liberal art.”

About The Drucker School

With a strong commitment to research, values orientation, and an intimate graduate-only curriculum, Princeton Review recently ranked the Drucker School fifth in the nation in faculty quality. The school offers a variety of professional and doctoral degrees, including MBA, EMBA, MSFE (jointly with CGU’s School of Math), MA in Arts Management (jointly with CGU’s School of Arts and Humanities), and MA in Politics, Business, and Economics (jointly with CGU’s School of Politics and Economics).

Named for both a pioneering thinker (Peter Drucker) and an accomplished doer (Masatoshi Ito), the school produces graduates who have a strong sense of social responsibility and a deep desire to make a difference by doing well while also doing good.

About the Drucker Institute

A close affiliate of the Drucker School and a campus-wide resource of CGU, the Drucker Institute is a think tank and action tank whose purpose is to stimulate effective management and ethical leadership across all sectors of society. It does this, in large part, by advancing the ideas and ideals of Peter Drucker.

The Institute acts as a hub for a worldwide network of Drucker Societies, volunteer-driven organizations that are using Drucker’s teachings to affect positive change in their local communities.

In addition, the Institute maintains a digital archive of Drucker’s papers; undertakes research that builds on Drucker’s writings; offers a major prize for nonprofit innovation; produces curricular material that distills Drucker’s decades of leading-edge thinking; applies Drucker’s work to current events (including through a regular online column in BusinessWeek by Institute Director Rick Wartzman); presents a slide show exploring the “Responsibility Gap”—society’s collective failure to be good and ethical stewards of our resources, people, and institutions; and hosts visiting fellows with Drucker-like insights and values.