CGU Alumni Well Represented on Drucker Institute’s List of 250 Best Managed Companies
They are the All-Stars of corporate effectiveness—seven companies that have achieved excellence in all five categories measured by Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute in its annual Management Top 250 ranking. They epitomize Peter Drucker’s definition of “doing the right things well.”
And 32 CGU alumni, from more than a dozen disciplines ranging from financial engineering to music performance, work for them. In all, more than 250 alumni from across CGU work for the Drucker 250.
“I think it speaks highly of our mission and values that students from such diverse backgrounds and interests are making a difference at companies that embody Peter Drucker’s principles,” said CGU President Len Jessup. “Of course, our alumni are making a difference wherever they work.”
The Management Top 250 ranking, reported in mid-December by the Wall Street Journal, measures corporate effectiveness by examining performance in five areas: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility, and financial strength.
For the third consecutive year, Microsoft was first in the overall rankings, though a lower score in the area of customer satisfaction kept it from claiming All-Star status. (To be an All-Star, a company must score at least 60, on a 0-100 scale, in every category.) The Journal noted that nine companies in the top 100 were given red flags for falling below the 25th percentile in one of the categories, with seven of the nine cited for issues with financial strength—most likely due in large part to the lingering effects of the pandemic.
The Drucker Archive, later named the Drucker Institute was established by Peter Drucker to carry forward his ideas and ideals. Since 2007, the Institute’s team has worked with thousands of leaders from major corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies to help make them more effective.
In September 2013, the Drucker Institute convened a group of scholars and business leaders to consider how to combat what they all agreed was a serious and growing problem for the economy and for society: the inordinate attention that most major companies devote to short-term financial results.
The gathering was thought-provoking, and the Drucker Institute team left the meeting committed to creating a new measure of corporate effectiveness—one that would give executives and investors a more complete, longer-term view of how a company was being managed. Four years later, the Management Top 250 was introduced.
“I applaud the Drucker Institute for the role it’s playing in challenging the narrative that the bottom line is the bottom line,” Jessup said. “So much more goes into measuring the success of a business and its impact on society.”