Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Platzhalter Speakers
Rick Wartzman
US

Executive Director, Drucker Institute,
Time contributor
and author

Biography

In addition to his duties at the Drucker Institute, Rick writes “The Drucker Difference” column for Time.com. A collection of his columns, What Would Drucker Do Now?, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2011. He’s also the editor of The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy (McGraw-Hill, 2010) and Drucker: A Life in Pictures (McGraw-Hill, 2013). Before joining the Institute, Rick worked for two decades in newspapers. He began his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he served in a variety of positions, including White House correspondent and founding editor of the paper’s weekly California section. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2002 as business editor and, in that role, helped shape “The Wal-Mart Effect,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Rick later became editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, West. Rick’s book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was published by PublicAffairs in 2008. It was one of the Los Angeles Times‘s 25 favorite nonfiction books of the year, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and a PEN USA Literary Award. Rick is the co-author, with Mark Arax, of the best-seller The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, which was selected as one of the 10 best books of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It also won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Rick serves on the board of the National Human Services Assembly, a Washington-based association of leading nonprofits, including the American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and United Way Worldwide. He is on the editorial board of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly publication on the social, cultural and political life of the state, produced by University of California Press. Rick is also on the board of Temple Israel of Hollywood, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles; serves as an Advisory Trustee to Southwest Chamber Music, a Grammy Award-winning ensemble based in Pasadena, Calif.; and is a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. For two years, Rick was an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.