Our Staff

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Rick Wartzman, Executive Director. In addition to his duties at the Drucker Institute, Rick writes “The Drucker Difference” column for Forbes.com. A collection of his columns, What Would Drucker Do Now?, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2011. He’s also the editor of The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy (McGraw-Hill, 2010) and Drucker: A Life in Pictures (McGraw-Hill, 2013). Before joining the Institute, Rick worked for two decades in newspapers. He began his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he served in a variety of positions, including White House correspondent and founding editor of the paper’s weekly California section. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2002 as business editor and, in that role, helped shape “The Wal-Mart Effect,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Rick later became editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, West. Rick’s book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was published by PublicAffairs in 2008. It was one of the Los Angeles Times‘s 25 favorite nonfiction books of the year, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and a PEN USA Literary Award. Rick is the co-author, with Mark Arax, of the best-seller The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, which was selected as one of the 10 best books of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It also won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Rick serves on the board of the National Human Services Assembly, a Washington-based association of leading nonprofits, including the American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and United Way Worldwide. He is on the editorial board of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly publication on the social, cultural and political life of the state, produced by University of California Press. Rick is also on the board of Temple Israel of Hollywood, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles; serves as an Advisory Trustee to Southwest Chamber Music, a Grammy Award-winning ensemble based in Pasadena, Calif.; and is a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. For two years, Rick was an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

Email: [email protected]

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Zachary First, Managing Director. Since the Drucker Institute launched in 2007 as an entrepreneurial startup with two employees, Zach has shared responsibility with Rick for the organization’s strategy, finances and operations. He invented, and now leads, the Institute’s portfolio of executive forums. He heads the design and operation of the Institute’s digital platforms (including this website, its daily blog, the Drucker Exchange, and its iPhone and Android mobile apps). He also oversees the Institute’s licensing and business development. He joined the Drucker Institute after a 10-year career in higher education research and administration. He served as the inaugural assistant dean at Olin College, which was founded in 2000 with a $430 million gift from the F. W. Olin Foundation in order to reinvent engineering education. Zach received his B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College, and his masters and doctorate degrees in higher education from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation research focused on the connection between presidential tactics and college and university performance. He is the co-author, with Richard P. Chait, of “Bullish on Private Colleges,” published by Harvard Magazine in 2011. He is a fellow of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education and a trustee and vice president of the board of the Children’s Center at Caltech, one of America’s leading nonprofit providers of innovative early childhood and preschool education.

Email: [email protected]

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T.A. Frank, Blogger. In addition to his work writing for the Drucker Exchange, Tom is a special correspondent for The New Republic and an editor at Zócalo Public Square. He has also been an editor at the Washington Monthly. Prior to entering journalism, he worked in Los Angeles in the field of corporate social responsibility monitoring, visiting factories in California and around the world to assess their labor conditions. Tom earned a B.A. in East Asian studies from Columbia University in 2000. In the 1990s, he played bass for the rock band Jonathan Fire-Eater, and he’s always happy to meet the odd soul who’s heard of it.

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Lawrence Greenspun, Senior Program Manager. Lawrence arrived at the Institute with a background in education and community service as well as freelance writing and editing. As a teacher, Lawrence spent more than two decades in public, private, and religious school systems, serving in roles ranging from first grade teacher to principal of a Hebrew high school and junior college. More than 20 years ago, Lawrence integrated community service within the educational programs at his school, and he has worked extensively with City Year and the Penn-Edison Partnership in Philadelphia. As the director of Main Line Writing & Educational Services (later La Jolla Literary Services), Lawrence assisted academics, entrepreneurs, professionals, and students with their writing and editing needs. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in religious studies, Lawrence served a stint on the Philadelphia Eagles media relations staff before embarking on his career in education.

Email: [email protected]

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Jamie Jones, Senior Marketing Manager. As the marketing manager, Jamie works to keep the customer at the center of everything that the Drucker Institute does. She developed the Institute’s performance metrics system and is responsible for collecting and analyzing the data to guide the Institute’s growth and program strategies. She is also the co-designer and co-producer, with Zach, of the Executive Forums. Jamie joined the Institute with a deep background in management, having worked her way up to VP of Operations in her family’s industrial filtration business. As VP of Operations, she doubled the revenue and eventually negotiated the sale of the business, staying on as part of the team to manage the integration of systems, procedures and cultures of the two companies. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both Environmental Studies and Geology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA in sustainable management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. In addition to doing her best to make the world a more joyous and well-managed place, Jamie is an avid backpacker in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Email: [email protected]

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Bridget Lawlor, Archivist. Bridget received her M.A. in archival studies and history from Claremont Graduate University. She recently served as an intern with the A.K. Smiley Public Library where she worked with accessioned collections for Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. Bridget’s responsibilities at the Smiley Library included cataloging a newly donated Abraham Lincoln collection. She is a recipient of CGU’s Ida Lloyd Crotty fellowship, which supports an outstanding woman scholar in the arts or humanities. Bridget earned her undergraduate degree from California State University, San Bernardino in modern European history where she conducted primary research on international laws prohibiting Holocaust denial.

Email: [email protected]

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Joseph A. Maciariello, Academic and Research Director. In addition to his work at the Institute, Joe is the Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author most recently of Drucker’s Lost Art of Management, written with Karen Linkletter. Joe has also abridged and updated Drucker’s 1973 classic, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, which was released by HarperCollins in early 2008 as Management: Revised. In addition, Joe collaborated with Peter Drucker to publish The Daily Drucker and The Effective Executive in Action, three Internet executive development modules entitled Leading Change and two articles on management in the social sector. He has written three articles providing a systematic, integrated description of some of the major works of Peter Drucker: “Peter F. Drucker on a Functioning Society” (Leader to Leader, Summer 2005), “Mastering Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive” (Leader to Leader, Summer 2006) and a book chapter, “Peter F. Drucker on Executive Leadership and Effectiveness” (in Leader of the Future 2). He teaches the course “Drucker on Management” for MBA and Executive MBA students and has developed the Drucker Curriculum, which is in use around the world.

Email: [email protected]

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Laura Roach, Director of Development. Laura joined the Institute in 2011 with more than a decade of wide-ranging fundraising experience. She most recently served as Senior Regional Development Director for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations, Conservation International. Prior to that she worked in development for health care programs, the performing arts and political campaigns. She serves on the Board of Trustees for the Children’s Center at Caltech and is active in the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. Early in her career, Laura was able to pay her way through college by rolling cigars while working in marketing for a cigar distributor.

Email: [email protected]

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Phalana Tiller, Senior Media Manager. Phalana came to the Institute with a diverse background in education, freelance writing and the performing arts. She has lobbied for public welfare reform with APWA in Washington, D.C., taught and developed curriculum for SIECUS in New York City, and performed in various film, theater and television productions in Los Angeles. She worked most recently as a humanities teacher at Camino Nuevo High School in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Phalana received her B.A. in history and M.A. in teaching from the University of Virginia. She currently serves as a legislative ambassador for the American Cancer Society and sits on the board of Kujali International.
Email: [email protected]

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