Ira Jackson: In the Shoes of the Management Guru

Many call it the Drucker Institute.

It is, correctly, The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at the Claremont Graduate Institute.

The new dean is Ira Jackson, and he still gets goosebumps when you refer to him as inheriting the mantle of Peter Drucker.

Drucker published his first book, “The End of Economic Man,” back in 1939. He wrote some 35 books in all before his passing last year at the age of 95. Jackson has published his own works but he bows to Drucker, as so many do, as the “guru of modern management.”

This is part of the reason that Jackson stresses the Drucker School is a management school and not a business school. There is a difference. Management is leadership, according to Jackson, and a business course does not teach the ethical side of it.

In fact, he agreed with the Business Journal when we suggested that business ethics might be an oxymoron. Still, it is true, he tells us, that some leadership qualities can be “toxic.” Corrupt leaders, like Stalin, Hitler and in our own times, Quadhafi or Hussein do have the ability to lead people in the wrong direction. This is because, as he described it to us, there is leadership, and then there is “followership.” It is that combination that gives us Iraq, as well as Enron.

Jackson is an avid reader of history. He believes in the adage that those who won’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Here, he believes, are the lessons of leadership. He lists Truman and Churchill as examples. Churchill, Jackson reminds us, was able to ask his nation for “blood, sweat and tears” and get it.

He also believes in the Peter Principle, in which qualified people get promoted until they reach a level of inadequacy.

“They’re all alone there,” he tells us. “They are in an area which they haven’t been trained for.” This, again, is because business schools don’t teach management, or ethics.

He sites the Johnson & Johnson Company, who did not set out to make money for their shareholders-they set out to provide medical supplies to nurses. Their intention was to do good. The money and the success followed.

Ira Jackson himself is a success story.

He grew up a Bostonian. He attended Harvard, worked for the mayor of Boston and helped to fight the bigotry of that town where, especially on the Southside, it is almost legendary.

His work there even led him to create a mayoral management school at Harvard that continues today.

Later, at BankBoston, he generated a financial program to allow the community to develop their economic dreams. That earned him the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Citizenship. Following that, he doubled the endowment and fund-raising efforts of Arizona State University as president and CEO of the school’s foundation.

This eventually led him to Claremont.

Jackson, like Drucker before him, believes that the most important asset of any organization is its people. Are there company managers out there who believe that people are easily replaced? Of course there are. Those companies, however, pay a high price in recruitment and training and exit strategies and even unemployment because they don’t see the value of managing the people that they have.

One of the first things that you learn in any management class is “resistance to change.” You can’t move the employees will say, because they have never faced that direction before.

Jackson points out that managers also have a resistance-to-change element in them. They expect that everything should run the same way and they insist on treating every employee the same. Some of those people may need a “pat on the head” rather than a “kick in the butt,” but many managers in the corner office don’t understand the difference.

Jackson also subscribes to the theory, fostered by a number of 21st century companies, of getting the manager out of that corner office and of getting the people out into the community. Not in the old-fashioned door-to-door manner; rather in the community involvement manner.

Drucker once said that the fax, the phone and the modem are the office of today. Jackson agrees. A Blueberry and a text capable phone in the middle of gridlock lets today’s businessperson conduct business. But service to the community in which the company does business is both a way to pay back and a way to keep fresh.

This is why the Drucker Institute has created the Leader To Leader Institute.

The Leader To Leader institute’s mission is to strengthen the leadership of the social sector. Established in 1990 as the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, the institute furthers its mission by providing social sector leaders with the essential leadership wisdom, inspiration and resources to lead for innovation and to build vibrant social sector nonprofit organizations.

It is this essential social sector, in collaboration with its partners in the private and public sectors, that change lives and builds a vigorous society of healthy children, strong families, decent housing, good schools and work that dignifies- all embraced by the diverse, inclusive, cohesive community.

Jackson and the Leader To Leader Institute believe that a healthy society requires three vital sectors: a public sector of effective government; a private sector of effective businesses; and a social sector of effective community organizations.

The mission of the social sector is changing lives. It accomplishes this mission by addressing the needs of the spirit, the mind and the body – of individuals, the community and society. The social sector also provides a significant sphere of individuals and corporations to practice effective and responsible citizenship.

Dean Jackson points out that the Leader To Leader concept came about when Drucker did the math and discovered that fully 10 percent of the GNP (Gross National Product) was in nonprofit funding. Abuse of that much financial power has led to embarrassment and scandals in the nonprofit arena and that need not, should not, happen.

Today Dean Ira Jackson is thrilled to be tackling the challenge that the Drucker Institute has taken on.

“We need to have the courage to, with imprecise measures, tackle and speak to the phenomena that is taking place today and developments that can take place tomorrow,” he said in a recent interview. “We are focused on having effective and ethical leaders and are not embarrassed about that. It’s at the core of Peter’s thinking. It is a privilege to be associated with his legacy.”