A Note from John Hope Bryant
The Bryant Journal | Bryant Group Ventures
Yesterday morning, I wrote a tribute for TIME magazine honoring the life of Alan Greenspan, who passed away Monday at the age of one hundred.
You can read it here: “Remembering Alan Greenspan: The Fed Chair, Bookkeeper, and Bandleader” — TIME Magazine
But I want to add something here, in this space, that belongs to Bryant Journal readers specifically.
The TIME piece tells the story of Alan Greenspan the musician — the young man who played clarinet and saxophone in the Henry Jerome Orchestra alongside Stan Getz, who did the books and filed the tax returns for his bandmates between sets, and who eventually understood that his true gift was not the saxophone but the economy. It tells the story of what Quincy Jones once shared with me about those early New York years, and what that story means for all of us who believe that financial literacy is the civil rights issue of this generation.
And it tells the story of a morning in 2003 — a school library in Washington, D.C., a room full of young people who had been largely bypassed by the American economy, and a Fed Chairman who set aside his prepared remarks and spoke from his heart.
That morning changed something for me.
I had been saying for years that financial literacy was not a soft idea — that understanding how money works, how credit works, how wealth is built, was the next great frontier of the civil rights movement. What I was building at Operation HOPE, Inc. was not charity. It was infrastructure. It was the economic equivalent of what the movement had fought for in the streets — access, dignity, and a seat at the table.
In 2003, those ideas were not yet mainstream. They were not yet cool. The rooms I needed to enter were not always open to me.
And then Alan Greenspan walked through one of those doors. He didn’t have to. He chose to. And by doing so, he gave a generation of young people — and gave me — something that no policy, no program, and no press release could provide: validation from the most credible economic voice in the world.
That is what great leaders do. They don’t just hold positions of power. They use those positions to lift others into the conversation. They conduct — in the truest sense of the word — a larger orchestra than the one they were hired to lead.
Alan Greenspan was that kind of leader.
I am grateful to TIME for the opportunity to honor him in this way. I am grateful to have known him. And I am grateful, most of all, for that morning in a school library in Washington — where the Maestro put down the script, and the music played.
Read the full piece at TIME. Share it with someone who needs to be reminded that the economy was built for all of us.
And then let’s get back to work.
Let’s go.
John Hope Bryant — founder of Bryant Group Ventures, Operation HOPE, Inc, publisher of the Bryant Journal and author of his 7th book Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America, now a bestseller. Bryant was recently named a member of the Forbes 250.
