Rick Wartzman

Irvine Senior Fellow, 2008

Rick Wartzman, Irvine Senior Fellow, is head of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute, a part of Claremont Graduate University.

He is a regular contributor to Fast Company, where his commentary was recognized by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing with its Best in Business award for 2018.

His latest book, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, was published by PublicAffairs in May 2017. It was named one of the best books of the year by strategy+business and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest.

Before joining the Drucker Institute in 2007 as its founding executive director—a position he held for nearly nine years—Wartzman worked for two decades as a reporter, editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. While business editor of the Times, he helped shape a three-part series on Walmart’s impact on the economy and society, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Wartzman is the author of two other acclaimed books of narrative history—The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (PublicAffairs, 2003) and Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (PublicAffairs, 2008). A collection of his magazine columns, What Would Drucker Do Now?, has also been published (McGraw-Hill, 2011).

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