The Gospel According to Drucker and Albrecht : Claremont MBA Program’s Gurus Look to Future
At the Claremont Graduate School, when they talk about classes in management, invariably they talk about a professor named Peter. But if you were to have a chat with Peter, he might tell you the real apostle was Paul.
Paul is Paul A. Albrecht, an administrator at the school who was thinking about the needs of experienced managers when he sought to glean important lessons from such fields as marketing, finance, economics and accounting and “tie them together and put them into some kind of vision for the future.”
That was back in the early 1970s. Peter is Peter F. Drucker, the Vienna-born management guru who agreed to join the faculty at the time, seeing under Albrecht’s stewardship a climate where history, philosophy and literature could be used to breathe insights into the myriad issues of managing people. “I was the back-seat driver,” Drucker recalls wryly of the early partnership. “But he went where I wanted him to go.”
The management program, a part of the graduate school--one of the six independent colleges on the 317-acre Claremont campus--has just gone through an extraordinary period. On Oct. 21, it dedicated the Peter F. Drucker Management Center in honor of its most celebrated faculty member. Earlier in the month, it announced the formation of a board of visitors, a group of 25 business leaders who have agreed to meet with faculty and students once a year.
And Claremont was rated first among smaller or “regional” business schools in the West, based on faculty, curriculum and overall preparation of students, in a survey of business school deans conducted by U.S. News and World Report.
Clearly, Peter and Paul have taken the program in its own direction. While many business schools seek to explain the world through mathematical models, Claremont has tried to be broader than that, faculty members say. At the same time, it remains determinedly small, its core of 10 people on the management faculty supplemented with dozens of others from such fields as philosophy, psychology, public policy and mathematics.
To keep a close watch over quality, it has resisted pressures to create “satellite” classes closer to downtown, meaning that Los Angeles students face an hourlong commute if traffic is heavy on the 35-mile trek east to Claremont. Tuition is $9,930 per year, reflecting the stiff costs of maintaining a private program with a respected faculty.
And in an era when many young people perceive a master’s degree in business as a ticket to the good life, the school has avoided a narrow vocational stress that might be a plus for certain lucrative jobs. “If you really want to be an investment banker, then there are other schools that can train you better for that, in terms of technique,” said Richard Ellsworth, a management professor, who earlier this year taught “ethics in management” with a philosophy professor. “Claremont is oriented to creating good, all-round business leaders rather than specialists or technocrats.”
While Albrecht, 64, played the organizer’s role, Drucker--author of at least 22 books and a reknowned pioneer in management studies--has served as the school’s intellectual beacon, the light that drew students and outside attention. Paul says admiringly of Peter: “He really filled the role of a star faculty person--which he is. He was tremendously crucial to all of this.”
When Drucker seeks to make a particular point in class, the whole of humanities are fair game. He has been known, for example, to draw parallels between officers communicating on a World War I battlefield and managers communicating in a modern corporation. “A typical lecture will cover not only the subject but also food, music, art, history, philosophy and theology,” said John Kanz, 51, a Claremont doctoral student and a manager at Hughes Aircraft.
Drucker, who turns 78 today, calls the school’s success “a very great personal happiness.” He made clear in an interview that he draws from so many disciplines because he sees management as no less than “the nature of man, the nature of God, and--believe me--the devil, too. When you’re dealing with man, you’re dealing with good and evil.”
Two MBA Programs
And he has no shortage of suggestions for improving the way things are run: “If you start out asking, ‘What would I like to do?’ you will end up ruining your business and yourself,” he recently lectured a group of reporters. “You have to ask, ‘What does the business need?’ It’s that simple.”
Yet despite Drucker’s magnetic presence, there are other reasons students attend the program. Many who have experienced the impersonality of much larger universities are comfortable with its small, relatively close-knit academic community. The Drucker center features two separate MBA programs, one oriented to 218 students in the early stages of their careers. The “executive” program, geared to those who have attained a middle level or even higher, has 249 students whose average age is 43. Claremont offers a doctoral degree in executive management as well.
In keeping with the personal atmosphere, staff members have tracked down students by telephone to warn them that a class has been canceled. To accommodate those who are trying to keep up with their daytime careers, courses are mostly offered late in the day and on weekends.
“We make sure they don’t need to come to campus, except to go to class,” said Candace Kattenhorn, director of the executive management program.
And students have gone to some rather unusual lengths to do just that. A company manager based in Lima, Peru, would take seven-week leaves to go to Claremont, Kattenhorn recalled. Another executive postponed his promotion and transfer to the East Coast for a year so that he could pursue his degree.
Students from Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have even commuted to school in their private planes. And helpful staff members have scrambled to nearby Cable Airport with books for pilot-students who had neglected to pick them up on the way out.
Dennis Laurie, 48, director of special projects at Atlantic Richfield Corp., puts it quite simply: “I love Claremont.” Laurie, whose responsibilities at Arco include coordinating the company’s Japanese activities, said the management education is important because “the world is just changing too quickly for anybody to sit back and believe that what worked 10 years ago--or last year--will work as the ongoing strategy for today.”
Indeed, Claremont officials say with pride that their program remains grounded in the real world, while also adhering to tough academic standards. “For management education to work, it has to deal with real problems, things that happen with real managers,” said Gale D. Merseth, dean of the Drucker center. “But it can’t just be anecdotal. It has to be disciplined, rigorous.”
Homework assignments can make the point. Richard O. McGuire, a senior vice president at BDM Corp., a defense-oriented consulting firm, recalled one that shook up his view of the world: to write a proposal eliminating the federal budget deficit in five years, while noting the political ramifications of each suggestion.
More Visible Now
“We think we understand it (the budget deficit problem),” said McGuire, 51, who flew his plane to class from Albuquerque en route to a master’s degree. “But let me tell you, you just don’t understand it unless you have to work with it.”
The elevation of “management” to a respected academic discipline did not happen overnight, at least not the sort of management that they teach at Claremont. Drucker, who has taught religion, philosophy, political science and Oriental art, said he became the first management professor on an American business school faculty at New York University nearly 40 years ago. He contrasts the Claremont of today with the NYU of those days, when he found it “practically hopeless” to establish a sweeping, liberal arts approach to the subject.
Nowadays, management programs are common, though they vary immensely in approach. Albrecht, who retired earlier this year as executive dean of the graduate school and is on leave as a professor from the Drucker center, said: “The field of mid-career education is much more evident and visible than it was 15 years ago. We tend to think we had something to do with that trend.”
James R. Wilburn, dean of the school of business and management at Pepperdine University, which ranked third in the West among the regional business schools, said respectfully of the rival institution: “I think Claremont is one of the few nationally recognized schools that has been able to design programs for senior executives without sacrificing academic quality.”
Supporters of Claremont’s approach point out the benefits that emerge simply by giving experienced managers the chance to mix with each other in an academic setting.
Roxane Spitzer, 47, a vice president at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, recalls that she instituted a program of follow-up checks on those who had had outpatient surgery at the hospital after listening to a fellow student describe how an auto dealership had enhanced consumer satisfaction by checking up on customers who bought cars.
“I think the best business executives cull ideas from other businesses and apply what works for them,” she said. “That’s what’s exciting.”
Those who believe--like Peter and Paul--in the gospel of good management might use a similar word to describe Claremont’s future. After all, as Drucker has counseled, the worst thing an organization can do is “keep on plugging” after it has achieved its goals. But insofar as Claremont’s goals include a more wisely managed, stable economy, it seems that the Peter F. Drucker Management Center will be plugging away for years to come.
