As the dean of the Drucker-Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, Ira A. Jackson has developed a deep connection with the school’s namesake, the late management guru Peter Drucker. In fact, Jackson likes to quote one of Drucker’s favorite sayings: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” And creating the future is exactly what Jackson believes he is doing everyday.

Jackson arrived at Claremont in the summer of 2006, and has used his experience to catapult the program into one of the top programs in Southern California. But this is nothing new to him. Throughout his career, he has brought entrepreneurship and excellence to government, higher education, and the nonprofit sector.  At the age of 26, he was chief of staff to Boston’s Mayor Kevin White.  At 32, he was the senior associate dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he helped lead the school during its period of rapid growth and institutional transformation.

 He left the Kennedy School to become Commissioner of Revenue for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where he was credited with being one of the architects of the “Massachusetts economic miracle.” He also served as executive vice president of BankBoston for a dozen years.  During his tenure at BankBoston, the company consistently received Outstanding Community Reinvestment Act ratings from federal regulators for leadership in strengthening inner-city communities. Jackson’s role in helping to support and expand CityYear earned him their “Big Citizen Award.”

Prior to coming to Claremont, he was president and CEO of the Arizona State University Foundation.  Jackson received an A.B. from Harvard College and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government, and attended the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.  He is co-author (with Jane Nelson) of Profits with Principles: Seven Strategies for Delivering Value with Values (Doubleday), described by Tom Peters as “a stunning achievement….and a survival guide for business executives and a survival guide for capitalism itself.”

Jackson was one of only six business school deans who attended the Global Leaders Summit Meeting of the UN Global Compact last July in Geneva. They were there to discuss ways to voluntarily advance human, labor and environmental rights and to combat corruption. Just a week earlier, in Claremont, Jackson hosted delegates from 10 nations gathered at the Drucker Institute for the first Global Symposium of Drucker Societies, dedicated to advancing responsible management practices in business, government and civil society that capture Druckerian principles and practices. Drucker, who challenged leaders to be both effective and ethical, is widely revered in Asia.

When Jackson came to the Inland Empire, he immediately realized the vast potential of the Drucker School of Management. Now, he has reached out into the community to spread the word of the school’s ideologies and world-class faculty. Under his leadership, the Drucker School was named in the top 10 in several categories by the Princeton Review, including sixth in the nation for quality of faculty.

And, his experience lends for the Drucker School to continue to gain traction among both younger MBA and experienced EMBA students throughout Southern California. (The Drucker School also offers graduate programs in politics and business, arts management, and is one of only a handful of programs in the nation to offer a graduate program in financial engineering.)

As Jackson sees it, the Drucker School is at the nexus of a new emerging movement: putting innovation to work for the good of society. “Profits without principles won’t work any longer,” say Jackson. “The world’s problems, starting with global warming and moving on from there, are simply too immense and interrelated to focus on making money to the detriment of the world around us. This is a time for creative and voluntary collaborations across all sectors: business, government, non-profit. It’s that cross-sector approach that sets the Drucker School apart and that promises to create the future in new ways.”

For Jackson, the future is about making the Drucker School one of the world’s centers for training the next generation of conscious and socially aware managers. As he likes to point out: “by embedding a new set of competencies and values in the next generation of leaders through a new business school curriculum, we are offering encouragement and evidence that human energy can be harnessed for social good as well as private profit, and that business as well as government and the nonprofit sector can all play instrumental roles as forces for good around the world.”

Jackson said he is committed to producing innovators of the highest degree not only business but also for the social sector -- and even for government.

“As Drucker himself said, innovation is the indispensable ingredient not only for a growing economy but also for a vigorous and healthy society. And our job here at the school is to produce innovators who both do good and do well.”