PRX handed out Zeitfunk Awards in 18 different categories, and an episode of “Drucker on the Dial” was cited as being the year’s 18^th most viewed piece among all of those that were embedded using PRX’s embeddable audio player.

The episode, which first aired in July 2011, was called “Beyond the Comfort Zone.” It included interviews with Gail McGovern, the chief executive of the American Red Cross, and Scott Keller of McKinsey & Co. about management challenges across diverse sectors.

“What’s notable about receiving this honor is that all the other programs in this category—including those from the Moth Radio Hour and Kitchen Sisters—aired on well-known public radio shows with huge national followings,” said Phalana Tiller, the Drucker Institute’s communications manager and the host of “Drucker on the Dial.” “We’re still quite new, and just trying to establish ourselves. So, seeing ‘Drucker on the Dial’ in such big-league company is really validating.”

A one-hour show on management and leadership, “Drucker on the Dial” is available for free on the second Friday of every month on the PRX, an online marketplace for distribution, review and licensing of public radio programming. It is also available for webstreaming through the Drucker Institute’s blog, the Drucker Exchange, and for podcast at iTunes U.

“Drucker on the Dial” features a wide range of well-known guests—executives, authors, academics and others—discussing topics that spring from the headlines. At the same time, the show is informed by the teachings of the late Peter F. Drucker, hailed by BusinessWeek as “the man who invented management.” The tagline for “Drucker on the Dial” is “where timely issues meet timeless principles.”

Marcus Buckingham

The Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University announced today that Marcus Buckingham, the renowned management author and thinker, has joined its Board of Advisors.

“One of Peter Drucker’s core principles was that people should build on their strengths so as to make their weaknesses irrelevant,” said Bob Buford, the Drucker Institute’s chairman. “Marcus has taken that fundamental concept and advanced it greatly through a remarkable combination of empirical research and insightful analysis. His work is truly Drucker-like, and we are honored to have him join us as we seek to make society better by advancing Peter’s ideas and ideals.”

Buckingham, who spent two decades as a senior researcher at the Gallup Organization, has written a string of best-selling books. They include: First, Break All the Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman), Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton), The One Thing You Need to Know, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, The Truth About You and Find Your Strongest Life. His latest project is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller StandOut, a book and strengths-assessment combination that uses a new research methodology to reveal people’s top two “Strength Roles,” which Buckingham defines as their “areas of comparative advantage.”

In 2005, Buckingham founded The Marcus Buckingham Company, which works with managers at Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Disney and other organizations to find their strengths and sustain long-lasting personal success.

“Marcus is not only an exceptional writer and thought leader, but he’s also done a tremendous job building his own company,” noted Rick Wartzman, the Drucker Institute’s executive director. “That kind of expertise is just what we need as we seek to scale up our programs and deepen our own impact around the world.”

Buckingham said he was honored to be appointed to the Drucker Institute board. “Peter Drucker is the most profound business thinker of the last century,” Buckingham remarked. “With his concept of the company as a social organism, his focus on the transformative power of entrepreneurship and his belief that the most productive companies and individuals ‘get their strengths together and make their weaknesses irrelevant,’ he laid the foundation for better leadership and a better society. I am excited to help the Drucker Institute expand and apply his thinking to the practical challenges of this coming century.”

These posts, translated from the English-language originals, will appear on the first Friday of every month beginning Feb. 3.

“Our readership is clearly a global one, and being able to provide content in more languages will help us connect to our growing audience around the world,” said Phalana Tiller, the Drucker Institute’s communications manager. “We have seen that about every three minutes, someone somewhere in the world Tweets about Peter Drucker,” Tiller continued. “It’s important for us to try to engage with the ever-expanding universe of Drucker-like thinkers, beyond the boundaries of the English language.”

The Drucker Exchange currently draws about 30,000 visits a month and is part of the Drucker Institute’s media suite, which also includes a radio show called “Drucker on the Dial” and a bi-weekly column in Bloomberg Businessweek online by Institute Executive Director Rick Wartzman.

• Great minds asking: How can management regain its legitimacy in society?
• Peter Drucker prodding executives at a big investment bank to answer the question: “What should our business be?”
• Thousands of university students in China learning about effectiveness, Drucker style

Click here to read it.

Click here to sign up to receive future issues of The Window and other information from the Drucker Institute.

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How to Change and Stay the Same

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Five Deadly Business Sins

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Oscar, Tony—and Now Drucker

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How Olympus Should Refocus

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Productivity’s Four Sworn Enemies

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Why Training Employees Is Always a High-Wire Act

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A Loving Intervention for Software

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Amazon’s Provocative New Chapter

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Merck, Gilmartin, Vioxx—and Drucker

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Fashioning Innovation via Conversation

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Finding and Leveraging Your Strengths

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Outspoken About Outcomes for Nonprofits

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S&P and the Trouble with Forecasting

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Vizio’s Outsourcing Hits a Profitable Note

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Behind America’s ‘Jobless Recovery’

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RIM’s Prickly Board Problem

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Summer Reading: Five Management Classics

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The Charitable Challenge

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WellPoint Ties Payment Boosts to Health Outcomes

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Earth to Elon Musk: Look Around

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Cisco Grows Smarter

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Yes, You Can Make Performance Reviews Worthwhile

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Why Japan Needs More Nonprofits

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How Spider-Man Poisoned Its Own Prospects

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Why Jack Griffin’s Time Expired

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For Nokia, One Good Call, One Bad

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Uncertainty? Get Over It

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A Different Steve Jobs Departs This Time

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Accelerating UAW’s Buy-in at GM

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Drucker Does Spirituality

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Cloud Computing and Peter Drucker

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As the Walkman Retires, Sony Rewires

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The Wall-less Office

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Churchill and Drucker: Perfect Together

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Avoid the Economist’s Folly

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Bank of America’s Self-Imposed Exam

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Burger King: Start Courting the Noncustomer

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The Rules of Alliance

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Facebook’s Privacy Puzzle

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BP Needed an Andon Cord

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Facing the Wreckage Head-on

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A Bold Management Strategy: Keeping Quiet

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Wal-Mart’s Blending Learning Plan

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Peter Drucker and the Hon Hai Suicides

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When Retirement Is Not an Option

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Goldman Sachs: Failure of Innovation

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Reflecting on Prahalad Reflecting on Drucker

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Japanese Baseball and Management Revelations

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The Service Sector Snag

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Toyota’s Management Challenge

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Women and the Knowledge-Work Trend

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Insourcing and Outsourcing: the Right Mix

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A Lesson in Performance Metrics

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Big Solutions Should Start Small

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Getting Toyota Out of Reverse

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Authentic Engagement, Truly

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Management Lessons on Nothingness, Drawn from Art

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Executives Are Wrong to Devalue Values

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Trust: Effective Managers Make It a Priority

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An Enthusiastic Thumb’s Up for Netflix

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10 Management Lessons from Lehman’s Demise

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Japan: Rethinking Lifetime Employment

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Health-Care Reform: The Right Kind of Compromise

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Management as a Liberal Art

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Innovation Isn’t Just for Startups

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Manage Your Boss

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Boredom, Not Rigor, Dampens Volunteers’ Spirits

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GM Lessons from the Alfred Sloan Era

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Solving the Health-Care Conundrum

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A Company Is More Than Its CEO

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Brand Velocity’s Knowledge-Worker Innovation

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The Old College Buy

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How a Lack of Focus Hurt Detroit

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AIG and Drucker’s Glimpse at a Very Dark Place

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Out with the Deadwood for Newspapers

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A Marketing Spill on Starbucks’ Hands

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Making Music with Drucker

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Obama’s Call to Duty Echoes Drucker On Ethical Organizations

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Ask “For What?” Before “Who?”

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A Time for Ethical Self-Assessment

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When Cutting Costs Is Not the Answer

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Auto Bailout: What Drucker Would Have Said

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What Obama Shouldn’t Do

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No Magic Bullet for the Economic Crisis

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Financial Leadership, the Missing Ingredient

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The Financial Crisis: What Drucker Would Have Said

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Put a Cap on CEO Pay

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Organizations Need Structure and Flexibility

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Why Manners Matter at Work

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What Drucker Would Say About Mervyns

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When 2008 Feels Like 1968

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Leveraging the Strengths of the Disabled

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Drucker’s Take on Making Mistakes

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Obama’s Drucker-Style Win

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Conditioning the Corporate Athlete

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Exxon Mobil Needs a Longer View

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Dusting Off a Managing Tome

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Peter Drucker’s Winning Team

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Drucker and the Complexities of Race

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Buffett’s Plan for Successful Succession

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Wide-Angle Thinking

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What Can Microsoft Offer Yahoo?

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Wikia’s People-Powered Engine

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Muhammad Yunus: The Unlikely Disciple

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Getting from Giving

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For Managers, Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

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Has Toyota Lost Its Way?

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The Countrywide Conundrum

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Google: A Druckerian Ideal?

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Drucker on … Radiohead?

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The Problem with GM’s UAW Deal

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Peter Drucker: Timeless, Ubiquitous

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Drucker’s Lessons for China

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• China’s greatest need and greatest opportunity: effective management
• The Drucker work that was banned and burned by the Nazis
• Doing Drucker with every eighth-grader in the South Bend, Indiana, public schools

Click here to read it.

Click here to sign up to receive future issues of The Window and other information from the Drucker Institute.

The top three essays will be presented at a special panel at the Forum on November 3 and 4 in Vienna.

The winning essays focused on the wider responsibilities of management in modern societies. Wasima Khan, a 24-year-old from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, won first place with her essay “Humanizing the Law of Business Corporations for Good Management Practices.” Camillo von Müller, 33, of Switzerland took second place. And Micah Stefan Dagaerag, 24, of the Philippines won third place.

“With the Peter Drucker Challenge, we aim to raise awareness among young people of the ideas of Peter F. Drucker, the man regarded as the ‘father of modern management,’” said Richard Straub, president of the Peter Drucker Society Europe. “The global essay contest should contribute to mobilize bright minds from the next generation of leaders based on a management philosophy that puts the human being at its center. We need this today more than ever.”

The winners were chosen by an international jury composed of business strategist, consultant and co-author of Predictable Magic Deepa Prahalad; John Peters, director of strategy and publishing at GSE Research Ltd. and editor of the journal Management Decision; and management consultant Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, author of The Definitive Drucker.

“We were very pleased to see that this year’s essays touched on a diverse range of topics, but were universal in their conviction that management as a profession can and should do more for the betterment of society,” Prahalad said. “Just as importantly, many of the essays touched on the practical aspects of driving these changes within organizations.”

In recognition of their achievements, the authors of the top 10 essays will be flown to Vienna and invited to actively participate in panels and breakout sessions at the 3rd Global Peter Drucker Forum 2011. In addition, 30 additional authors of high-quality essays will be awarded free access to the conference.

Gold-level sponsors of the Drucker Challenge include Mazars and Cap Gemini Austria. The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management served as the silver sponsor.

About the Peter Drucker Society Europe
The Peter Drucker Society Europe is a practitioner-led, multi-stakeholder group that builds on Peter Drucker’s fundamental ideas and ideals with the aim of contributing to the evolution of management as a vital piece of a functioning modern society. It is an affiliate of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and part of a broad network of Drucker Societies that operate across the globe.

To fulfill its mission, the Peter Drucker Society Europe is establishing Drucker Society chapters in various locations (currently Austria, Barcelona and Mannheim). It is supported by institutional members, which include businesses, nonprofit organizations and academic partners. Among these are Deutsche Telekom, the Cooperative Banks in Austria (Raiffeisen), 3M, OMV and major consultancies such as Malik Mangement Zentrum St. Gallen and Contrast Management Consulting.

Examples of the nonprofit networks involved are the European Foundation for Management Development, the Red Cross in Austria, the Innovation Value Institute in Ireland and the European Academy of Business in Society. The academic network consists of institutions such as University of St. Gallen, WU Vienna, TSM Business School Netherlands, European University Business School, Bled School of Management and Lappeeranta University Business School and Nottingham Trent Univesity Business School.

Each year, the Drucker Society Europe organizes the Global Peter Drucker Forum, a crystallizing event where decision makers convene to discuss the future of management in a pragmatic and solution-oriented manner.

Rick Wartzman, the Institute’s executive director, stressed the importance of paving the way for innovation through what Peter Drucker called “planned abandonment.”

“Every organization has a finite amount of resources,” the Chronicle quoted Wartzman as saying. “So the first step toward innovating is . . . figuring out what you’re going to stop doing to free up those resources and to stimulate the search for the new.”

Drucker, Wartzman noted, recommended that organizations review all of their products, processes and distribution channels every few years, essentially putting each one “on trial for its life.”

During that exercise, he said, the organization should try to determine where each product, process and distribution channel is in its lifecycle. The questions to ask, according to Wartzman, include: “Is it starting to decline? Is it still heading toward its peak? Is it close to its peak and, if so, when will it decline and how quickly is it likely to decline?”

“Even on successful programs, nothing stays static,” Wartzman added. “They constantly have to change.”

Direct Relief International, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based humanitarian organization that provides essential medicines, health supplies and equipment to improve the health of people affected by poverty, disaster and civil unrest, is the recipient of the $100,000 first-place prize—an award made possible in large part through the generosity of The Coca-Cola Foundation.

The award recognizes, in particular, Direct Relief’s aggressive adaptation of information technology to better meet its mission. Specifically, through ongoing work with its network of healthcare providers worldwide, Direct Relief has built a commercial-grade IT system that has enabled a more precise, more targeted, more efficient and more expansive flow of donated medical goods to nonprofit healthcare facilities in more than 70 countries and across the United States. This innovation has resulted in an array of specific features for improving inventory management, warehousing, ordering and distributing goods.

This year’s second-place winner (to receive $7,500) is Beyond Shelter, a Los Angeles-based organization that has made strides in shifting the fundamental response to family homelessness from offering temporary shelter and services to re-housing homeless families as quickly as possible, and then providing them with a range of support services in permanent housing. Beyond Shelter’s pioneering Housing First program has successfully assisted more than 5,000 homeless families in Los Angeles County since its inception in the late 1980s. The third-place winner (to receive $5,000) is the Mona Foundation, a Kirkland, Wash.-based organization. One of its adopted projects, Digital Study Hall, is improving education for some 2,000 poor children at 21 schools across India. The program offers a number of innovative services, including a user-generated video-sharing system that allows village schools access to high-quality, interactive lessons on a variety of subjects. Students who participate in the program have shown a dramatic increase in their test scores and participation in class activities.

The Drucker Institute will honor and include the first-place winner and two runners-up at an Innovation Forum it is hosting on November 8-9 in Claremont. The forum will be an intimate, invitation-only event that brings together about 25 people from the corporate, nonprofit and public sectors whose jobs involve managing innovation inside their organizations. Together, they will collaborate on ideas to make innovation more systematic and effective.

In 2010, Direct Relief used its strengthened IT system—the result of what it calls “market research on the noncommercial market”—to better manage the distribution of $258 million in medical aid to healthcare providers in the U.S. and around the world. Healthcare providers, in turn, have been able to take advantage of Direct Relief’s state-of-the-art SAP software to reduce their own administrative burden, make more informed product requests and increase their ability to focus on patient care.

“One of the aims of the Drucker Award is to recognize organizations that, in Peter Drucker’s own words, are ‘making a real difference in the lives of the people they serve,’” said Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute. “That is certainly the case when it comes to Direct Relief International. Its fundamental insight—to take the best in private-sector technology and uniquely adapt it for the social sector—has greatly strengthened a weak link in the medical supply chain, filling what Drucker termed a ‘process need.’

“We hope that Direct Relief will prove to be an inspiration to other nonprofits, whatever fields they’re in,” Wartzman added. “Its efforts demonstrate that social-sector organizations can achieve the very highest levels of efficiency.”

The final judges for the Drucker Award were Wartzman; Cecilia Carter, vice president of global diversity, community and government affairs for Starbucks Coffee Co.; Jody Greenstone Miller, the founder and chief executive of Business Talent Group and a member of the Drucker Institute’s Board of Advisors; Geneva Johnson, secretary of the Leader to Leader Institute’s Board of Governors; Michelle Nunn, CEO of the Points of Light Institute; and C. William Pollard, chairman emeritus of ServiceMaster Co. and a member of the Drucker Institute Board. The judges were particularly impressed with Direct Relief’s effectiveness, noting that Direct Relief is the only nonprofit in the U.S. to be licensed to distribute pharmaceuticals in all 50 states.

“Direct Relief is deeply honored by the Drucker Institute’s recognition and so very thankful for the generous award that accompanies it,” said Thomas Tighe, president and CEO of Direct Relief International. “The astounding generosity of people who support Direct Relief’s work and the profoundly threatening circumstances faced by the people our organization serves provide a special, acute motivation to do more, do it better and do it more efficiently.”

The Drucker Award has been given annually since 1991 to recognize existing programs that meet Peter Drucker’s definition of innovation—“change that creates a new dimension of performance.” Cash prizes are designed to celebrate, inspire and further the work of innovative social-sector organizations based in the United States. Thanks to funding from The Coca-Cola Foundation, the first-place award will remain at $100,000 through at least 2015, up from the $35,000 prize of previous years.

The event—held on September 21, 22 and 24 in Beijing, Nanjing and Guangzhou—was put on by the Peter F. Drucker Academy, an education and training organization based in China. The theme of the forum was “Undertaking Responsibility in a Time of Great Change.”

In his address, titled “Leading in Turbulent Times,” Wartzman encouraged the more than 1,500 forum attendees in the three cities to “take leadership beyond the walls of their own organizations.” He noted that the balance is tricky. “If history has taught us anything about organizations,” Wartzman said, “it’s that they run into trouble when they take on too much, particularly outside their own spheres of expertise. But at the same time . . . leaders must take responsibility for what happens to the community at large.”

Quoting Peter Drucker, Wartzman continued: “Yes, each institution is autonomous and has to do its own work the way each instrument in an orchestra has to play its own part. But there is also the score, the community. And only if each individual instrument contributes to the score is there music.”

Other speakers at the forum included attorney and entrepreneur Cecily Drucker, Peter Drucker’s daughter and a board member of the Drucker Institute; Drucker Institute board member Minglo Shao, founder and chairman of Bright China Holding Ltd. and head of the Peter F. Drucker Academy; Joseph Ma, China vice president for General Electric Co.; Albert Wu, director of corporate strategy for Hewlett-Packard’s China operation; and Zhao Xiaojun, president of the architectural firm CCDI, which designed the Beijing National Aquatics Center, popularly known as “the Water Cube,” for the 2008 Summer Olympics.