Lex leads development of the Drucker Institute’s lifelong learning system for cities, which is currently being piloted in South Bend, Indiana.

In his previous role, Lex served as the Chief Strategy Officer of enFocus, Inc, a nascent organization centered on building better communities through talent attraction and civic innovation. At enFocus, Lex was responsible for the design and execution of major strategic initiatives. As the organization’s second staff hire, Lex was instrumental in catalyzing 400% growth in revenue from 2013-2018.

Lex graduated from the University of Notre Dame with Bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Spanish. He is a New Jersey native and loves reading and, when he’s not at work, playing and watching sports.

In addition to his work writing Courage for the Drucker Institute, Tom writes for Vanity Fair and is a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. Prior to entering journalism, he worked in Los Angeles in the field of corporate social responsibility monitoring, visiting factories in California and around the world to assess their labor conditions. Tom earned a B.A. in East Asian studies from Columbia University in 2000. In the 1990s, he played bass for the rock band Jonathan Fire-Eater, and he’s always happy to meet the odd soul who’s heard of it.

Lawrence directs the Drucker Institute’s public sector strategic and comprehensive planning services, with an emphasis on community engagement as the foundation for effective strategic focus and implementation. Lawrence also developed and delivers the Drucker Playbook for the Public Sector, a suite of leadership and management training programs for increased individual, team and organizational effectiveness. More than 2,500 public sector officials have completed at least one form of the Drucker Playbook regimen. Lawrence also currently serves as a senior advisor for Bendable, the Drucker Institute’s lifelong learning system, and helped lead the initial conception, design, and implementation of Bendable in South Bend, Indiana, which served as the model for its rollout nationally.

From 2013 – 2020, Lawrence taught a graduate course in Leadership as part of the University of Notre Dame’s entrepreneurship-focused, ESTEEM Master of Science program, the capstone of more than 30 years Lawrence spent as a formal and informal educator, fulfilling roles ranging from first grade teacher in a public school to principal of a Hebrew high school and junior college. As the director of Main Line Writing & Educational Services (later La Jolla Literary Services), Lawrence assisted academics, entrepreneurs, professionals, and students with their writing and editing needs. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Religious Studies, he served a stint on the Philadelphia Eagles media relations staff before embarking on his career in education.

Lawrence has done extensive volunteer work in support of educational, environmental, and social justice causes, including time as an education advisory board member for BizWorld, a Prairie Ambassador for the American Prairie Reserve, and a tutor-mentor for the Mayor’s Commission on Literacy in Philadelphia. Lawrence embedded experiential learning and community engagement within the curriculum of the supplemental religious school for which he served as a principal more than 30 years ago and has championed interactions between diverse groups of people as a key to promoting lifelong learning and a better functioning society throughout his career. An avid reader and writer, Lawrence is the author of “All the Lonely People,” a collection of short stories. His first novel, Shulamit Rose is available as an audiobook or in manuscript form at Bandcamp.com.

Jamie leads our strategy and process design work across multiple programs. In her unique role she translates client needs into Drucker-based questions—and converts those questions into collaborative exercises that elevate the effectiveness of leaders in the private, public and social sectors. Jamie also brings our Company Rankings to life for senior executives and their teams through our corporate consulting services and is instrumental in shaping the curricular strategies of our Spring Cleaning and Harbor Freight Leadership Lab programs. Jamie joined the Institute in 2009 with a deep background in management, having worked her way up to VP of Operations in her family’s industrial filtration business. In that role, she doubled the company’s revenue and eventually negotiated the sale of the business, staying on as part of the team to manage the integration of the two companies’ systems, procedures and cultures. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both Environmental Studies and Geology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA in sustainable management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. In addition to doing her best to make the world a more joyous and well-managed place, Jamie is an avid backpacker in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Kelly leads research and development for the Drucker Institute’s company ranking system.

Fred helps to lead local initiatives in South Bend in support of the Drucker Institute’s lifelong learning platform, Bendable.

He joined the Drucker Institute in 2018 as a community stakeholder for Bendable while working as a consultant at the University of Notre Dame. Fred is a lifelong learner with a wealth of real-life experience that helps him connect with people from all walks of life.

Fred earned a degree in Business from Ivy Tech Community College, graduating Cum Laude. He holds certificates in Executive Management from the University of Notre Dame, and in Project Management from Louisiana State University. He is a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, as well as the Kappa Beta Delta International Honor Society for ACBSP Accredited Business Programs.

Fred is currently pursuing a Project Management Professional certification, working on a short documentary film about his life, and serving as a motivational speaker. He loves to play chess, and is passionate about writing lyrics that both inspire and inform.

Phalana leads the Harbor Freight Leadership Lab, a program established in partnership with Harbor Freight Tools for Schools that aims to boost K-12 skilled trades education by developing effective leaders. Phalana also drives learning throughout all Drucker Institute programs including producing content for our online courses for managers and training programs for rising public sector leaders, as well as the digital learning modules for our nonprofit performance recognition program. Her portfolio includes serving as curriculum director of our youth-centered Drucker for English Language Learners program and executing our social media strategy.

Phalana joined the Drucker Institute in 2010 with a rich background in teaching and curriculum design, nonprofit program management and the performing arts. She has lobbied for public welfare reform in Washington, D.C., taught youth and adults in Virginia, New York and California, and performed in film, theater, commercial and television productions globally.

Phalana holds a B.A. in history and M.A. in teaching from the University of Virginia. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Pilgrim Place, a historic senior community committed to justice, peace and care of the Earth, and as a Board Member of AgingNext, a regional nonprofit committed to the needs of aging adults and their families, especially those who want to continue living independently at home, and on the Executive Committee of Claremont Change, a grassroots organization aimed at addressing local issues of racial justice and equity. Phalana is an avid racewalker and a struggling student of the Japanese language.

Rick founded and leads the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society, and previously served as Executive Director of the Drucker Institute from its founding in 2007 until early 2016.

As a regular contributor to Fast Company, his commentary was recognized by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing with its Best in Business award for 2018. He has also written about management and leadership for Fortune, Time, Forbes and Businessweek.

His latest book, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America was published by PublicAffairs in 2017. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in current interest and was named one of the best books of the year by strategy+business. 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 boards of the employee benefit company California Harvesters Inc., the California Institute of Advanced Management and the progressive publication Capital & Main. For two years, Rick was an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

Dan leads the Drucker Institute’s software engineering efforts with a focus on scaling Bendable from its roots in South Bend, Indiana, to a nationwide network of learning marketplaces. Dan joined the Drucker Institute in 2021 specifically to take on the challenge of transitioning Bendable’s codebase from its successful first implementation to a full-fledged, enterprise-level, multi-tenant system.

Having co-founded five Silicon Valley start-ups, including in the consumer packaged goods, electronics and Software-as-a-Service sectors, Dan has more than 30 years of experience creating and growing companies from the ground up. He specializes in early-stage businesses and has held engineering leadership roles at nine start-ups during his career. His interests include web-based process and workflow management systems, content management systems and multi-tenant applications.

Dan holds an MBA with a concentration in software development management from the University of California at Davis. When not honing his Node.js, MongoDB and React skills, Dan relaxes by building guitar amplifiers based on classic designs from the 1950s and ’60s.

Sarah is Senior Director of Social Innovation and head of product for Bendable, the Drucker Institute’s lifelong learning and workforce development program.

Prior to joining the Drucker Institute, she was Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO, where she brought more than 20 years of experience in the Ed Tech and Learning Sciences fields to human-centered design for learning, education and the future of work.

Previously, Sarah was Director of Digital Learning Solutions at SRI International where she led the development of technology-based curricular systems, assessments and learning tools. Sarah was also a Product Manager at Scholastic Inc. where she led the development of Ed Tech solutions, including Read 180, an award-winning intervention literacy product.

Sarah holds a masters degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.