Ira Jackson may have had more jobs than any other university dean in America. After graduating from Harvard University in 1970, the Boston native went to work as chief aide to two big-city mayors; first Kenneth Gibson of Newark, N.J., then Kevin White of Boston. Later, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis asked him to clean house at the state’s corrupt tax department. And all that happened between stints spent teaching at Harvard, writing books, heading major foundations, serving as executive vice president of BankBoston and directing Harvard’s Center for Business and Government, to name not all of his jobs. Since 2006, Jackson has been dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University in L.A. County’s eastern border. Describing it as the “little engine that could,” Jackson says he intends to put the tiny business school – named for the famous management consultant who died in 2005 – more squarely on the map. The Business Journal recently caught up with Jackson at his office on Claremont’s newly named Drucker Way as the school prepared for this week’s Drucker Centennial Week marking the author’s hundredth birthday celebration. He talked about his long career, his vision for the Drucker school and how a lifelong Easterner is making the adjustment to Los Angeles.
Question: You spent much of your early life involved in politics. How did that happen?
Answer: I grew up in a public housing project in Chelsea, Mass., where my folks were social activists. I remember being at a political rally in 1952 and sitting on Adlai Stevenson’s lap (the year) he went down to defeat against Eisenhower that first time. There aren’t too many people from Boston of my generation who didn’t grow up to be Kennedy Democrats. President Kennedy had a profound influence on our entire society, but especially on impressionable young kids from his hometown. I actually ran for town meeting (city council) while I was in college. At age 18, I was the youngest ever to do so.
Q: I take it you weren’t successful.
A: No. I did, however, get deeply involved in urban governance at a very young age. After graduating from Harvard, I was teaching at a community college in Newark, N.J., when one night I found myself driving behind a black guy in a Lincoln Continental with a Harvard sticker on the back. So I pulled him over and he was scared to death because he’d never seen a white guy in downtown Newark after 5 p.m. Remember, this was in the early 1970s. I said, “Did your kid go to Harvard?” It turned out that his son and I had lived across from each other freshman year. So he told me to shave, get a coat and tie and be in his office the next day at 9 a.m. I did and there was Kenneth Gibson, the newly elected first black mayor of Newark whose campaign manager was the guy I’d met. Gibson said, “Ira, how’d you like to come to work for me?”
Q: What did you do for him?
A: Wrote speeches and handled Washington relations. I did everything short of being a bodyguard. He kind of adopted me and brought me into the inner sanctum. Then, a couple of years later, I got another lucky break; Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, called me out of the blue and said, “If you ever want to come home I’ve got a job waiting for you as my chief of staff.” So I went back to Boston.
Q: How long did that last?
A: Three turbulent years. Busing was a big issue then, and it was also during Kevin White’s brief involvement in national politics as George McGovern’s running mate for a couple of hours before he got knocked off by somebody else from Boston who turned out to be a very good friend, Ted Kennedy. It was an exciting time.
Q: Did you get to know Kennedy well?
A: Yes, quite well. He was a U.S. senator from the time I was 14. I got to know him when I was Kevin White’s chief of staff and, later, as associate dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Ted Kennedy was chairman of our advisory board and I got acquainted with him personally, as well as Jacqueline Onassis and the rest of the family. Like almost anybody from Boston, you think of Teddy and a smile comes to your face because he was warm, garrulous and always took time for the personal niceties.
Q: Aside from that one college try, did you ever consider running for office yourself?
A: I’ve had friends insane enough to encourage me at various points. I was sorely tempted, but my wife reminded me that having a kitchen full of strangers smoking cigarettes and eating day-old Dunkin’ Donuts was probably not conducive to raising four children.
Q: Michael Dukakis later asked you to become the state’s chief tax collector. You say it was a turning point in your life.
A: It was the hardest job I have ever done. I have limited skills, and they were all in use all that time. I was operating on 12 cylinders, six and a half days a week for five years. It was probably my best job.
Q: What made it so tough?
A: My predecessor’s principal deputy had committed suicide while under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office. Twelve tax examiners and auditors were indicted, and there was a crisis of public confidence. In five years we turned it around.
Q: How did you accomplish that?
A: We treated honest taxpayers like customers and evaders as criminals. One thing I did was scare the bejeezus out of tax evaders by putting a seizure unit in place. We designed orange Day-Glo signs with “Seized” printed across them diagonally. And I made sure that the back of them would tear the enamel off even a gorgeous million-dollar yacht.
Q: Tell us about your business experience at BankBoston, which came afterwards.
A: I started as a senior vice president, and eventually became executive vice president. It was an old commercial bank whose then-CEO said, “Ira, we need you to turn this place around.” It was the oldest commercial bank in America, but it had become arrogant, inwardly focused and not well liked. It was in a lot of trouble for a lot of reasons, and I was offered a seat on the management committee to sort of become the public face of the bank.
Q: What was the problem?
A: It had to do with relations with regulators, relations with the community, relations with the media and employee relations. Eventually the bank was acquired by Fleet, which was not my cup-of-tea kind of company. We were at the losing end of the deal anyway, and someone had to go so I went. I went back to Harvard, which has kind of been my halfway house for most of my life. They’ll take me in when I’ve transgressed or sinned and am prepared to do penance by teaching a little, writing or doing administrative stuff.
Q: How’d you end up in Claremont?
A: A friend of mine became president of the Claremont Graduate University and called out of the blue and said, “Ira, I want you to consider becoming dean of the Peter F. Drucker School of Management.” I said, “Bob, I’m not interested in being a business school dean.” He said, “Take a closer look at it, Ira, I think it’s your life’s work.” So I took a closer look and fell in love with the mission of the Drucker school.
Q: Explain the mission.
A: To train the next generation of effective managers and ethical leaders for business, government and not-for-profits. Our approach is theory and practice combined in a values-oriented way. My function is to strengthen the core, revitalize the institution and propel Drucker forward into the real world. There are a thousand business schools in the U.S. and 10,000 in the world, but there’s only one Drucker school and I firmly believe that we need Drucker-like thinking now more than ever.
Q: Why do you think Drucker is still important?
A: Drucker is a powerful voice for responsibility in an age of greed, indulgence and irresponsibility. He wrote 39 books – tens of thousands of pages of insight about management – and is generally considered the father of modern management. Peter considered himself, first and foremost, a social ecologist. He cared about the social condition and felt that we needed effectively managed, ethically led and socially responsible citizens and organizations, not just in business but in government and civil society.
Q: Did you ever meet him?
A: I never had that privilege. I was not a Drucker disciple, per se. I had read some of his stuff, but when I was tempted with the offer of becoming dean, I went to school on Drucker and discovered that the orientation of this school and Drucker’s philosophy closely parallels my own interests and passions. I felt like I was coming home.
Q: What would he say about the current economic crisis, especially the high salaries of CEOs?
A: It’s hard for me to accurately channel Peter Drucker, but we know that as far back as 1980 he was leading an almost Jeremiah-like movement against high CEO compensation. Back then CEOs were earning, on average, about 40 times what their employees were earning. Peter thought it was too much, that it would rupture the trust between folks making the products and the guys taking the credit. Today it’s 10 times worse, so we’re pretty confident that Peter would say, “This is insanity. We’ve gone off the rails.”
Q: Why is the Drucker school so obscure?
A: Many would-be M.B.A.s seeking a school look at the rankings, which are largely driven by compensations. The fact that many of our graduates go off into the not-for-profit world means that we’re never going to be highly ranked. Lots of students would want to come here, but there’s a value proposition I have to convey in a more convincing way: that we’re purpose-driven, passionate and not embarrassed to say that we want to leave the world a better place.
Q: Would you like to grow the school?
A: You bet. Right now we have 15 full-time faculty members, and only 400 students. It’s a small faculty; we know each other intimately and we don’t have disciplines. I want desperately to grow the faculty by at least 50 percent, but have not yet grown the financial resources to do so. We have a fraction of the resources of Wharton or Harvard or Stanford.
Q: How do you spend your days?
A: I like getting up early to do a little mountain biking. We have some beautiful mountains in back of our house. I get to the office around 7:30 a.m. and devour the L.A. Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe. During the day I spend time with students, faculty, financial prospects and my colleagues. A lot of what I do isn’t sexy – the blocking and tackling you need to do to get your hands in the bucket. At a small school like this, the dean needs to write letters, mediate disputes and, occasionally, give out a prize or two. I also try to take part in the civic life of my community.
Q: Speaking of civic life, what’s your impression of Southern California?
A: All Easterners are intrigued by California Dreamin’, even though the California dream, in some respects, has turned into an economic nightmare. But this is still a very interesting place – vital, diverse and pulsating with waves of energy going in multiple directions.
Q: Have you explored much of Los Angeles?
A: I’m fascinated by L.A., though I can’t say that I’ve learned to penetrate it. The geography and highways are all new to me. My kids grew up without driver’s licenses because they could take the train everywhere in Boston. I do get to the beach, to downtown, to great restaurants. But I have friends in Santa Monica who’ve never been to Claremont; maybe they drove by it on the way to the desert, but they didn’t even know it existed. I’m someone who’s entranced by community. It’s something I’ve always wanted to be a part of, yet I’ve had a hard time figuring out where it is here in L.A.
Q: Speaking of kids, tell us a little more about your family.
A: My wife is the niece of Kevin White, the former Boston mayor I used to work for. We have four children: Kate, 30, who I call Erin Brockovich with a Harvard degree because she’s a very formidable and feisty environmental activist; Joe, 28, is with a hedge fund in New York; Mathew graduated from Arizona State University and is looking for a job at 24; and Alex, 22, just got back from doing a year of community service in Africa.
Q: Do you get to see them much?
A: We have an 1840 farm house in Vermont that I’m very attached to, and I just went mountain biking with one of my kids there last week. We did sneak off for Thanksgiving with the kids in Las Vegas, where my wife had never been. That was a different kind of Thanksgiving than being in Vermont. I never would have suspected it after 31 years of marriage but, low and behold, my wife loved Las Vegas so we’ll have to go back. I also want to see Yosemite in the worst way.
Ira A. Jackson
TITLE: Dean
ORGANIZATION: Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of
Management at Claremont Graduate University
BORN: 1948; Boston
EDUCATION: B.A., Harvard, 1970; master’s of public administration, Harvard, 1976
CAREER TURNING POINT: Leaving Harvard to become commissioner of revenue for Massachusetts
MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE: His childhood rabbi, Roland Gittelsohn; former Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson and former Boston Mayor Kevin White
PERSONAL: Lives in Claremont with his wife, Martha White Jackson; has four grown children, ages 22 to 30, and a second home in Vermont
Activities: Reading, mountain biking, hiking, community service
