AUTHOR

For more than three decades, Jay Greene has written about some of the most important companies, business trends and top executives in the world. He is currently a reporter with The Washington Post, and has worked as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and as BusinessWeek’s Seattle bureau chief. Greene has focused on technology throughout his career, and regularly interviews some of the industries most prominent executives including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Writing about technology gave Greene the opportunity to cover design just as it was emerging as a one of the key business strategies of the 21st Century, a way for businesses to differentiate themselves from increasingly commoditized rivals. He traveled to Europe to learn about the creative process at the high-end consumer electronics firm, Bang & Olufsen, and visited Nike’s Innovation Kitchen to learn the recipe for making its much sought-after shoes.

That reporting led Greene to write his first book, Design Is How It Works, a look at the innovation process at such companies as Virgin Atlantic, Nike and Lego. His reporting shows that the best design isn’t merely about style and form. It’s about the way products and services work. Greene explains how the smartest companies place a premium on design because it helps them intuit what customers want often before customers even know they want it.

In May 2019, Greene joined The Washington Post to cover technology from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing for The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek,  Greene has also worked for The Seattle Times, CNET, The Orange County Register, Variety, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, The Daily News in Los Angeles, and The Press Enterprise in Riverside, California.

Greene won the 2013 Best in Business Award for explanatory journalism from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for a series he wrote for CNET about the life cycle of an iPhone. In 2006, he shared with colleagues at BusinessWeek the Clarion Award, sponsored by the Association for Women in Communications, for articles on the clash of evangelicalism and Corporate America. And in 1997, Greene won the Missouri School of Journalism’s Lifestyles Journalism Award, a consumer affairs reporting prize, for leading a team of reporters at The Orange County Register on a five-day series about the business of gathering and selling personal information.

In 2014, the City University of New York's journalism school awarded Greene one of the first McGraw Fellowships for Business Journalism. In 2015, Greene won an Immigration Journalism Fellowship from the French-American Foundation. And in 2017, the Japan Center for International Exchange awarded Greene its US-Japan Journalism Fellowship.

Greene received a Master of Science degree with a concentration in business and political reporting from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and studied English and Irish literature at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England.