Optimiza Academy and Drucker Institute partner to meet with top executives and business leaders of Mena region

Notes and media contacts

About Optimiza Academy:
Optimiza Academy is a B2B Human Capital Development Solutions Provider dedicated to building a professional, efficient and effective workforce for its customers in the MENA region by designing and executing result-oriented and measurable training solutions and related consulting services in business, management & ICT designed and delivered according to each organization's needs and its strategic objectives
All programs & Solutions offered by Optimiza Academy include analysis of current and desired competencies of each participant combined with personalized follow up and action plans according to his/her job function, role and level in order to insure highest ROI.

About The Drucker Institute:
In May 2006, more than 100 leading Drucker-like thinkers and practitioners gathered in Claremont, California, to help answer one question: What is Peter Drucker's legacy? Attendees included Jim Collins, management expert and best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last; Paul H. O'Neill, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former chairman of Alcoa; A.G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble; Nobuhiro Iijima, CEO of the multi-billion dollar Yamazaki Baking Co. and Masatoshi Ito, the founder and honorary chairman of the Ito- Yakado Group, Asia's largest retail chain.

This distinguished group's answer to the question was that Drucker's legacy is much more than the man or his writing. Drucker's legacy, they said, is a collection of ideas and ideals desperately needed by future generations of leaders responsible for the companies and communities in which they work and live.

In response, the Board of Advisors of the Peter F. Drucker Archives (founded in 1999) and Claremont Graduate University took a crucial step in 2006: they decided that the best way to keep Drucker's legacy alive was not simply to look backward (through old manuscripts and other documents), but to look forward (by building on Drucker's wisdom and applying it to important contemporary issues).

Their mandate, in other words, was to transform the archival repository into a think tank and an action tank, whose purpose is to stimulate effective management and ethical leadership across all sectors of society.

Out of the Drucker Archives grew the Drucker Institute. It is a campus-wide resource of Claremont Graduate University that is closely aligned with the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, where Peter Drucker taught for 35 years, and which continues to produce effective managers and ethical leaders for business, government and civil society.

About the Speakers
Rick Wartzman, Director: 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.

He 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. His new book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of The Grapes of Wrath, was published by Public Affairs in fall 2008. Rick is also an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Zachary First, Assistant Director: Zach joined the Drucker Institute after a 10-year career in higher education. He worked most recently as the inaugural assistant dean at Olin College, a new undergraduate engineering institution founded with a $430m gift from the F. W. Olin Foundation, where he led the invention and implementation of the judicial and residence life programs. Zach received his B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College, and his masters and doctorate degrees in higher education from Harvard University.

His doctoral dissertation research focused on the connection between leadership tactics and organizational performance. He also currently serves as principal investigator for a study of innovation in higher education funded by the Spencer Foundation.