Giving Thanks

It's that special time of year when we get together with family and friends for some of life's simplest and sweetest pleasures, including food, football and fun. It's also a good time to stop to give thanks for all of our blessings.

We live in a world of stark contrasts: abundant riches for some, choking poverty for many; magnificent natural beauty, and heartbreaking environmental degradation; personal freedoms, and political repression; creativity and innovation, and numbing bureaucracy and incompetence.

We remind ourselves, as we prepare for the traditional Thanksgiving feast in the comfort and security of our community, that more than 160,000 brave men and women are serving in harm's way in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When the Pilgrims first settled in New England back in 1620, they brought with them a deep commitment to the ethic of stewardship: the belief that we have an obligation to leave the world better than we found it. Native Americans have a poetic way of conveying a similar conviction: we must treat the earth well, because it was not given to us by our parents, but loaned to us by our children.

As dean of the Drucker School, let me cite just a few of the many blessings that I consider to be among the most important in our life as a community.

The blessing of purpose. In a world desperately in need of a unifying sense of purpose, at a time when so many are disillusioned by the singular pursuit of profit, individual success or consumption, we at the Drucker School have a noble and urgent mission: to make the world a better place through more effective management and more ethical leadership of organizations in all sectors of society. This unifying and ennobling mission enriches our lives and inspires our work. We are blessed to belong to a purpose-driven institution that makes our work important, inspirational and uplifting.

The blessing of educating the next generation and creating new knowledge. Whether we are faculty, students, staff, alumni or just friends of the Drucker School, we are all privileged to be part of an institution that epitomizes Peter Drucker's vision of a knowledge society. We are a knowledge institution -- one where all of us are knowledge workers. Where else but here in the academy is there an institution dedicated exclusively to creating and disseminating knowledge?

We are also blessed to be part of a global community. 40% of our students here at Drucker are from nations other than the United States. Our curriculum and the life experiences of our faculty reflect a wide range of diversity, which enriches our learning and broadens our cultural perspective, and understanding. Drucker Societies now exist in ten countries, ranging from China to New Zealand to Switzerland, and like-minded scholars and practitioners -- people who want to pursue Druckerian practices such as lifelong learning and corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship -- are planting the seeds for new Drucker Societies in places like India and Vietnam and Austria (just in time for the 2009 celebration of Peter's birth in Vienna, 100 years ago).

We all have the privilege and the blessing of belonging to an institution that is intimate in scale, engaging by design, and significant beyond our relative small size.

A short letter doesn't provide sufficient space to list all of the things I'm grateful for as dean of the Drucker School. But I'd be remiss if I didn't single out two groups for special mention. Our faculty, which was recently ranked #6 (out of 290 business schools surveyed) in the nation by the Princeton Review, continues to set a sterling example of accessibility, engagement and excellence -- in both teaching and applied research. And our dedicated and professional staff -- which has recently been strengthened by new directors of the Drucker Institute and the MBA Program – both give us a core of competence and caring that is the envy of other professional schools. (To get a better sense of exactly how faculty, staff and students are making a difference, check us out online at www.drucker.cgu.edu, and click on our new electronic video magazine at www.cgu.webvideovision.com).

Over this Thanksgiving holiday, as we reflect upon our multiple blessings, this is an ideal occasion to recommit ourselves to work to make this world safer, more sustainable, and with greater social, economic and political justice than was bestowed to us.

With warmest and best wishes, and with thanks for your friendship and your belief in our mission,

Ira A. Jackson
Dean and Professor Management
Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito
Graduate School of Management
Claremont Graduate University