An Extraordinary Q&A: Ira Jackson

Ira has done and seen it all. Literally. He’s held fifteen jobs across government, banking, academia, and civil society. He rebuilt a corrupt state tax agency from the inside by treating its four million taxpayers like customers. He pioneered inner-city banking at a moment when every other institution in his industry was treating a legal mandate as a compliance checkbox — and showed that the inner city was actually one of the best business opportunities anyone had ignored. He’s helped build the CAP Collaborative, which takes senior executives from the private sector and puts them in rooms with city councilors and state senators, on the theory that leaders who only know their own sector aren’t really leaders yet.