For more than two decades, Jay Greene has written about some of the most important companies, business trends and top executives in the world. From 2000 to 2009, he served as BusinessWeek’s Seattle bureau chief, overseeing the magazine’s coverage in the Pacific Northwest. Greene’s primary reporting responsibility was Microsoft. He routinely spoke with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, covering the company’s battles with antitrust regulators both domestically and abroad and chronicling the company’s transition from scrappy upstart to bureaucratic giant.

Greene has also written extensively about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, taking a critical look at its mixed record of trying to reform high school education in the United States, and traveling to Africa with its CEO to learn first-hand about it’s multi-billion dollar efforts to help some of the world’s poorest farmers.

Writing about technology at BusinessWeek gave Greene the opportunity to cover design just as it was emerging as a one of the key business strategies of the 21st Century, a way for businesses to differentiate themselves from increasingly commoditized rivals. He traveled to Europe to learn about the creative process at the high-end consumer electronics firm, Bang & Olufsen, and visited Nike’s Innovation Kitchen to learn the recipe for making its much sought-after shoes.

That reporting led Greene to write his first book, Design Is How It Works, a look at the innovation process at such companies as Virgin Atlantic, Nike and Lego. His reporting shows that the best design isn’t merely about style and form. It’s about the way products and services work. Greene explains how the smartest companies place a premium on design because it helps them intuit what customers want often before customers even know they want it.

Prior to joining BusinessWeek, Greene covered Microsoft for The Seattle Times. He also worked as a business reporter for The Orange County Register, Variety, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, The Daily News in Los Angeles, and The Press Enterprise in Riverside, California.

In 1997, Greene won the Missouri School of Journalism’s Lifestyles Journalism Award, a consumer affairs reporting prize, for leading a team of reporters at The Orange County Register on a five-day series about the business of gathering and selling personal information. In 2006, he shared with colleagues at BusinessWeek the Clarion Award, sponsored by the Association for Women in Communications, for articles on the clash of evangelicalism and Corporate America. He also led a team of reporters at BusinessWeek that won the New York Press Club’s Web Award for Spot News in 2007, writing about Bill Gates’ retirement from Microsoft.

Greene received a M.S. with a concentration in business and political reporting from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and studied English and Irish literature at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.

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