Lawrence Crosby appointed dean of the Drucker School of Management

Lawrence Crosby has been appointed the Henry Y. Hwang Dean of Claremont Graduate University (CGU’s) Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, where he will also serve as a professor of management.

Crosby is an internationally acknowledged expert on the measurement and management of customer relationships. Most recently, he was dean of the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University.

“We are excited to welcome Larry to our Drucker School,” CGU President Deborah Freund said. “He is an outstanding example of an entrepreneur, a manager, and an academic leader. He built his successful career answering the famous question posed by Peter Drucker, ‘What does the customer consider value?’ We are eager to bring him together with our outstanding Drucker School faculty and students to move the school to the next level.”

From 2010 to 2013, Crosby was dean of the Spears School, where he created the Watson Graduate School of Management, the PhD in Business for Executives program, and successfully raised funds for a new business school building. He achieved outstanding results, including improving the US News and World Report rankings for the school, which was cited as one of only four schools in the US to achieve 100 percent placement for MBA graduates within three months of graduation.

Crosby described what he found in the Drucker School that attracted him to the position. “The legacy of Peter Drucker has helped maintain a focus on such overarching leadership issues as organizational effectiveness, innovation, employee and customer relationships, management of knowledge workers, social responsibility and individual well-being. All are approached from a transdisciplinary perspective,” Crosby said. ”I admire how the faculty and students are bridging these topics with contemporary concerns around big data, the cloud, mobility, sustainability, ethical decision-making, governance, global competitiveness, design thinking, and the development of new business models.”

In 1996, Crosby founded and served as chairman and CEO for Symmetrics Marketing Corporation, a customer loyalty research and consulting business in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2004, he sold the company to Synovate, a global market research company, where he continued to serve as chief loyalty architect of the Customer Experience Practice.

Crosby earned his bachelor’s degree, an MBA, and a doctoral degree in business administration from the University of Michigan. Beyond his business career, he served on the faculty at Arizona State University, the University of Michigan and the University of Nebraska. Crosby’s work has been published in a variety of academic and professional journals. Focusing on measures, models and management principles, his innovative practices in the field of customer relations have been adopted by a global following of Fortune 500 companies.

“The Drucker School has a rich tradition and an exciting future,” Crosby said. “As dean, I will work to sustain that momentum and continue to deepen our ties with the creative industries, the Inland Empire, and our international partners.”

Crosby will begin his new position on August 1.