About the Author
Jack attended Bishop Eustace Prep in Pennsauken, New Jersey. He then attended Georgetown University, where he graduated from both the School of Business and the Law School. Inspired by Georgetown’s tradition of sending many of its graduates into public service, he early on decided that he would attempt to split his career between the private and public sectors.
In the fall of 2021, Jack became an Adjunct Professor at the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine Campus), where he taught Business Law and currently teaches Management in the newly established College of Business. He also serves as a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Arbitration Judge, deciding disputes between investors and their brokerage houses, and disputes between brokerage houses and their employees. Jack was also certified as a Florida Circuit Civil Mediator.
In the public sector, Jack served as Vermont’s Chief Environmental Enforcement Attorney, leading a legal staff with state-wide prosecutorial jurisdiction. He subsequently served as the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (appointed by Governor Howard Dean, M.D. and confirmed by the Vermont Senate), where he led a staff of 280 professionals. He also served as one of the Commissioners on the Ozone Transport Commission (Wash., D.C.). He has testified about environmental issues before Vermont Legislative committees and committees of the U.S. Senate.
In 2007, Jack was recruited by Governor Charlie Crist to serve as the Director of the Southeast District of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, where he led a staff of 150 professionals, who were responsible for environmental regulatory matters in the five southeast counties of Florida. He led the FDEP’s emergency management response in southeast Florida to the BP-Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
In the private sector, Jack acquired a reputation as an accomplished litigator, representing clients accused of environmental violations by state and federal authorities, and clients named as defendants in employment, contaminated sites, and construction-loss cases. He has argued fifteen cases before state supreme courts, and appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd Cir.) and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
At one point in his career, Jack lived in Manila, ROP, where he worked as the Southeast Asia Regional Director for a U.S. trading company.
He established, and was the CEO of, a regional Class-B FM broadcast facility (WJJR-FM) headquartered in Rutland, Vermont. With four other investors, he established, and was the in-house counsel for, a company that manufactured high technology resistance-weld monitors that were retrofitted onto welding robots.
In 1996, Jack became discouraged by some of the ideas of Bernard Sanders, Vermont’s Independent Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Jack campaigned against him and was the Democrat nominee in the general election. He received the editorial endorsement of the Burlington Free Press, Vermont’s only state-wide newspaper, but lost the general election to the incumbent, who was supported by the Democrat Party. The race received national attention because of the Democrat Party’s refusal to support him, and his “One Man Protest March” in front of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Wash., D.C.
Having been rejected by the Democrat Party, in 1998 Jack ran as a moderate Republican for the U.S. Congress. He again received the editorial endorsement of the Burlington Free Press, but failed to win the primary contest. He describes those two campaign experiences as among the most interesting and enlightening experiences of his life.
Dissatisfied with the character-traits-list-approach as the accepted way to define character and leaders, Jack wrote Three Wellsprings of Leadership©, a book that examines the “phenomenon” of Leadership, and identifies certain sources of Leadership. Jack has established that many individuals can be authentic and artful leaders, without having to be preoccupied with the latest lists of allegedly indispensable character traits, and the latest leadership fads. One of his by-lines is that “Leaders are poets, not logicians©.
Jack conducts short-form seminars and training sessions in Leadership.