Greg is CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, a private company that uses the principles and practices of jazz music as a cultural technology to enhance leadership success and team excellence. Along with his wife and partner, Jewel Kinch-Thomas, the Jazz Leadership Project works with firms such as JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, TD Bank, and Google. The leadership blog TuneIntoLeadership.com features both of their writings. 

He’s the co-founder of the Omni-American Project, a civic organization that promotes a robust, pluralistic center through music and culture while combating illiberal extremes. The Omni-American Project is rooted in the intellectual legacies of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison and is committed to a core principle: “Out of many, one pursuit of civic and cultural excellence.”

Greg has been a professional journalist for over 25 years, writing for publications such as Village Voice, Salon, Guardian Observer, The Root, American Legacy, New Republic, Uptown, among others, including the New York Daily News, for which he was the jazz columnist for several years. As an editor, Greg has worked with Forbes Media’s American Legacy Woman magazine and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Harlem World magazine in the early 2000s.

As an educator, Greg taught a course in 2020 titled “Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos.” Thereafter, he co-facilitated a six-month class titled “Stepping Up: Wrestling with America’s Past, Reimagining Its Future, Healing Together.” Greg has lectured on jazz and American thought at institutions such as Columbia, Hamilton, Ben Gurion University, Dartmouth, and Harvard.