Becky Reichard Named the Doris Drucker Chair in Global Management

A leading scholar of leader development and founding director of LeAD Labs, Becky Reichard takes a chair whose namesake is a fitting match: Doris Drucker, the inventor and lifelong learner too often overlooked in the Drucker story.

Claremont Graduate University (CGU) has named Professor Becky Reichard the Doris Drucker Chair in Global Management at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. The appointment recognizes Reichard as one of the most cited scholars in her field and a teacher and mentor whose work reaches well past the classroom, into the organizations she studies and advises.

A Career Defined by Leadership Science and Applied Impact

Reichard’s research asks what actually develops leadership. Across more than sixty publications, cited over 10,000 times, she has traced its mechanics: the feedback people get, the goals they set, and the way they come to see themselves. She is a leading voice on psychological capital, or PsyCap, the mix of hope, confidence, resilience, and optimism that people lean on when things get hard, and her meta-analysis on the subject is still widely cited today. Much of her recent work looks at how to speed that growth up for women and other leaders the field has too often overlooked, and at how people grow through experiences outside the office, from global assignments to sports to moments of crisis.

In 2013, Reichard founded LeAD Labs, the Leader Evaluation, Assessment, and Development Labs at CGU. Under her direction, the LeAD Labs has put leadership research to work for real organizations, bringing in nearly $1 million in grants and consulting contracts from over twenty funders and giving more than 100 graduate students hands-on experience in the process. It is a very Drucker way to work: treat management, in his phrase, as a liberal art, and test the ideas where they actually count.

As academic director of the PhD in Executive Management program, Reichard helps accomplished leaders turn their own practice into scholarship. She teaches graduate courses in leader development and positive leadership and has given more than seventy-five invited talks and workshops. She has also chaired more than a dozen doctoral dissertations, several of whose authors are now professors themselves, and she serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies and on the editorial board of The Leadership Quarterly. Her new book, Leadership: A Practical Guide, will be released early next year and is positioned to revolutionize how universities support student leadership development.

“When we thought about who should carry Doris Drucker’s name forward, Becky Reichard was the obvious choice,” said David Sprott, Henry Y. Hwang Dean of the Drucker School of Management. “Her scholarship is about how people grow into leaders, especially the ones the world tends to overlook. Doris was a scientist and inventor who kept reinventing herself well into her nineties, one of the most remarkable and most overlooked figures in our school’s history, and Becky honors that legacy in everything she does.”

Who Was Doris Drucker?

Doris Drucker (1911–2014) was a scientist, inventor, and author who never really stopped starting over. She earned a master’s in physics from Fairleigh Dickinson University in her early fifties, writing her thesis on the Doppler effect, and worked for years as a registered patent agent. At eighty-two, she started her own company and invented Visivox, a gadget that flashes a light when a speaker’s voice drops too low, something she dreamed up after years of watching audiences strain to hear Peter lecture. She published a memoir in her nineties, under the fantastic title Invent Radium or I’ll Pull Your Hair, and was still on the tennis court around the same age.

For sixty-eight years she was Peter’s closest reader and toughest editor, and after he died she kept his ideas in motion. Her advice for a long, useful life was blunt: “Stay as active as you can and keep learning. Find something that engages you, and avoid sinking into the daily routine.”

The parallel is not lost on the school. A science degree in her fifties, a company in her eighties, a reinvention past ninety: Doris lived the kind of lifelong growth Reichard studies, and the kind Reichard wants to make possible for people who do not usually get the chance.

The Doris Drucker Chair is supported through the generosity of Edward Jones, whose partnership with the Drucker School reflects a shared commitment to educating thoughtful, responsible, and globally minded leaders — the very work Reichard has built her career around.

Stewardship of Drucker Values

The title is an honor, though it also comes with a job to do. Reichard plans to keep building the school’s leadership research, mentoring its doctoral students, and growing LeAD Labs. “I’m honored to hold a chair named for Doris Drucker, a woman who spent her life proving that curiosity and courage have no expiration date,” Reichard said. “My work has always been about helping more people grow into the leaders they’re capable of becoming, and I’m grateful to pursue it in a community that takes both ideas and people seriously.”

Professor Reichard’s appointment to the Doris Drucker Chair takes effect immediately.

Learn More

The Doris Drucker Chair exists to honor scholarship that pushes management forward, which is exactly what Becky Reichard has spent her career doing. It is also the teaching that every student at the Drucker School of Management gets to learn from. Explore our graduate programs to study with faculty like Professor Reichard, including the PhD in Executive Management she leads, or reach out to our admissions team to find your path. We are the Future of Management, and it is being shaped by people who study how leaders are made.