How an Executive PhD Reshaped Antonio Gaskin’s Career

Antonio Gaskin, Director of Field Operations at Frontier, a Verizon company, and a PhD candidate in Executive Management at the Drucker School,  explains how the Executive PhD turned two decades of corporate leadership into a research agenda on tokenism, recognition, and career outcomes among Black men in corporate America.

Two careers can look the same on paper. Same metrics. Same tenure. Same managers checking the same boxes. What separates them is often invisible: who got the early stretch assignment, who was read as a “leader” before they had the title, who had to outperform the room before being trusted with it.

Antonio Gaskin has spent two decades operating inside that gap. As Director of Field Operations at Frontier, a Verizon company, he leads the teams that keep service running across communities. Most people only think about it when something stops working. Before Frontier, he held a series of leadership roles at Verizon, where he trained technicians, redesigned workflows, and steered service performance through one of the most consequential decades of change in telecommunications.

He has also, throughout that career, often been one of the very few Black men in the rooms where decisions about those teams were made. That experience, felt rather than just observed, is the throughline that brought him to the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.

“I came to Drucker because of its legacy of management as a humanistic discipline,” he says. “Peter Drucker’s belief that management exists to serve people, not simply profit, aligned with the values I had been trying to live out across my career in telecommunications.”

Gaskin wanted a way to study, with rigor, what he had been navigating on instinct. As a PhD candidate in the Executive PhD in Management program, he examines societal expectations, tokenism, and career outcomes among Black men in corporate America, questions he has been living with since long before he had a research design behind them.

How Does the Executive PhD Reshape a Working Executive’s Thinking?

Practitioners are often taught to trust their gut. What graduate study does, particularly the Executive PhD, interrupts that habit and asks whether the gut is reading the right signal.

“My time at Drucker has made me a more deliberate and evidence-informed leader,” he says. “In my role overseeing Field Operations, I now approach workforce challenges through a research lens, asking what the data actually shows before acting on instinct.”

Organizational behavior theory, he explains, has sharpened his diagnosis of team dynamics. Instead of treating performance gaps as individual failures, he looks for the structural conditions producing them. A missed promotion stops being a story about one person and becomes a question about the system around that person, who got mentored, who got information early, who was given the benefit of the doubt the first time something went wrong.

That habit of mind connects directly to the principle he says has stayed with him most.

“Drucker’s insistence that leadership is ultimately about responsibility, not authority, that distinction restructured how I think about my own role.”

For most of his career, he says, he measured influence by rank. Drucker reoriented him toward impact: who is better because of decisions he made, and who was harmed by decisions he failed to challenge. Few working executives ask that second question out loud. Gaskin’s dissertation, in a different form, is trying to answer it.

What Does Gaskin’s Research Aim to Change?

Most scholarship about underrepresented leaders in corporate America still treats their experiences as anecdotal, individual stories collected as illustration, rarely organized as evidence. Gaskin’s research is positioned to do something different. By systematically examining societal expectations, tokenism, and career outcomes, he asks what changes when the professional experiences of Black men are read as data rather than exceptions.

“My goal is to translate dissertation research into actionable frameworks that organizations can use to create more inclusive environments for underrepresented leaders,” he says.

Frameworks travel. Anecdotes do not. A framework can be adopted by an HR team, embedded in a leadership development pipeline, and used to audit a promotion process. It gives organizations a way to examine themselves before deciding what to change. His aim isn’t to convince organizations they have a problem; it’s to give them the language and the evidence to look at it honestly.

How Does the Work Connect to Community?

Gaskin’s scholarship draws from the same Long Beach he grew up in. He serves on the boards of the United Cambodian Community and the Long Beach branch of the NAACP, and volunteers at Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles. On campus, he represents the Drucker School on CGU’s Student Senate and engages with the Office of Black Student Affairs and LeAD Labs, the university’s evidence-based hub for leader evaluation, assessment, and development.

The same person who studies how organizations underestimate talent at the top spends his evenings with organizations that serve people the broader economy has already underestimated. The dissertation isn’t separate from those rooms; it draws from them.

“I want to be remembered as someone who refused to separate excellence from equity,” he says.

That refusal, to treat them as a trade-off, as a tension to be balanced, as competing priorities, is what gives his work its coherence.

What’s Next: Practitioner and Public Intellectual

Gaskin describes the next chapter as operating “as both a practitioner and a public intellectual whose work is felt beyond the boardroom.”

The Executive PhD is structured to make that pairing possible, built for senior leaders who are not stepping away from practice but going deeper into it, adding the conceptual frameworks, research methods, and intellectual community required to examine, refine, and articulate the systems they already lead.

For Gaskin, that means continuing to run field operations at Frontier while completing original research that he hopes will be cited “not just in journals but in boardrooms and HR offices, in conversations where real change is being negotiated.”

He is also clear about the personal stakes.

“I carry that into every room I walk into as a Black man in a predominantly white industry,” he says of the self-awareness Drucker has cultivated in him.

For him, the room is the unit of analysis. Who is in it? Who is not? Who gets to speak? Who gets to lead? The dissertation is one way of taking that question seriously. The career, increasingly, is another.

What Might Surprise People About Antonio Gaskin?

Asked what people might be surprised to learn about him, Gaskin points away from the data and back toward narrative.

“I am a serious student of Black cinema and independent film,” he says. “Some of my most important thinking about identity, performance, and belonging has come not from academic texts but from films that center Black life with honesty and complexity.”

That sensibility, he adds, quietly shapes how he reads his own research; work that refuses to flatten its subject, that holds complexity rather than resolving it, that treats people as people rather than as illustrations of categories. He intends his research to do the same.

Antonio Gaskin is a PhD candidate in the Executive PhD in Management program at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He serves as Director of Field Operations at Frontier, a Verizon company, and previously held leadership roles at Verizon. He earned an Executive MBA from Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. A Long Beach native, he sits on the boards of the United Cambodian Community and the Long Beach NAACP and volunteers with the Union Rescue Mission. His dissertation examines societal expectations, tokenism, and career outcomes among Black men in corporate America.

Considering an Executive PhD?

Antonio Gaskin’s path, two decades of telecom leadership turned into research that’s reshaping how organizations think about recognition, is exactly what the Executive PhD in Management at the Drucker School is built for: working professionals who want to turn years of field experience into rigorous, publishable scholarship without stepping away from their careers. Ready to see where yours could lead? Explore the Executive PhD program or request information to connect with our recruitment team.