Author Description

Mannie Jackson is President of Boxcar Holdings LLC, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Naismith Memorial Basketball of Fame, Chairman of the Board and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, and Chairman and a founder of the Executive Leadership Council. After a brief professional basketball career in the National Industrial Basketball League and with the Harlem Globetrotters, Jackson went on to distinguish himself in corporate life as a senior executive with Honeywell Inc, and as one the first African-Americans to serve on multiple (six) Fortune 500 boards of directors. Jackson, a former All-Ten point guard and captain of the University of Illinois basketball team, has two honorary doctorate degrees. He built a career at Honeywell as president of that company’s telecommunication business, which he built as a venture start-up by acquiring seven regionally interconnected companies and sourcing a highly publicized technology agreement with Sweden's LM Ericsson Co. Jackson went on in his career to rescue the Harlem Globetrotters from bankruptcy in 1992, when he became the first African-American to own outright a major sports and entertainment organization. In a short time the organization was revived as a dominant global brand reaching top quartile Q-ratings and accruing fourteen consecutive years of growth at an average annual rate of 14 percent. Mannie Jackson’s inspirational memoir is an odds-beating story that spans his history-making careers in sports and business and chronicles his journey from being born in a rain-soaked railway boxcar to leadership and significance.