For Drucker dean, small is beautiful

Ira A. Jackson had never heard of the Drucker School until he was approached to lead it as dean.

And when he arrived in July 2006, the campus looked "startlingly small, almost to the point of being invisible."

Jackson, 59, appeared to have little in common with the business school known officially as the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.

For years, Jackson had held a string of prestigious posts in government, business and academia. By age 40, he had helped engineer rapid growth at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and overhaul Massachusetts' tax collection process.

In those jobs, he had access to enormous coffers and staffs. At Drucker, he's making do with about 20 core faculty members and a lean $54-million endowment.

But the school's driving purpose -- to train ethical entrepreneurs to focus on the greater good -- clicked with Jackson.

"It felt almost like coming home," the Boston native said.

Tucked away in sleepy Claremont as part of Claremont Graduate University, Drucker seems far from Los Angeles but close enough to top-tier business schools such as USC and UCLA to be overshadowed.

With fewer than 300 students, Drucker is a "boutique school," Jackson said. Harvard's MBA program has about 1,800 students.

"Maybe size and scale is less significant than purpose," Jackson said. "The space we occupy is needed now more than ever."

In 1971, modern management guru and self-styled "social ecologist" Peter Drucker spearheaded development of the country's first executive MBA program for working professionals. The Claremont program expanded and was named in his honor in 1987.

Drucker died at age 95 in 2005, after finishing his 39th book. He pioneered the idea of management as a liberal art, because, as Drucker once said, "it deals with . . . the nature of humankind, good and evil."

Drucker's groundbreaking social entrepreneurship model is in high demand, Jackson said, because of a backlash against recent corporate scandals.

John Perez, 40, began pursuing a post-master's degree in 2006 after meeting with Jackson. Months later, Perez used ideas from his classes to land a position as a commander with the Pasadena Police Department.

"Ira chats with you as if you're the most important person," Perez said. "At other schools, they forget about you once you're in."