Rick Wartzman is the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. Before taking this post, he worked for two decades as a newspaper reporter, editor and business columnist. He began his career in 1987 at The Wall Street Journal, where he served in a variety of positions, including White House correspondent, Houston bureau chief, 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," a three-part series that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He then became editor of the newspaper's Sunday magazine, West, which under his leadership was named by the Missouri School of Journalism as the best regularly scheduled feature supplement in America. 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 ten best books of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the ten 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 next book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of The Grapes of Wrath, is to be published in 2008 by PublicAffairs.

As a California-based Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Mr. Wartzman wrote for a variety of publications about the state's business climate, the nexus between business and immigration, income inequality and regional development.