2025 Business Hall of Fame: Greg Harris

Greg Harris leads the way out of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and into the shadow of the 50,000-square-foot expansion under construction on an acre of land leased from the city, just west of the iconic I.M. Pei-designed glass pyramid. The institution’s president and chief executive officer explains that the massive triangle set to roof the atrium lobby overlooking Lake Erie, the “drum” that will house a performance hall and mixed-use space, and another round structure — shapes that repeat those of the original 1995 building — will put a corner of the pyramid under it.

“The pyramid still holds true,” he assures. “(The expansion) doesn’t overshadow it. But it’s also not subservient to it. It’s a really nice balance.”  

More impressive than the $100 million expansion’s design by New York City-based Practice of Architecture and Urbanism is that the Rock Hall has more than enough money to pay for it. A whopping 90% of the $167.5 million raised to date by a decade-long $175 million capital campaign was contributed by private sources. It’s just one of the feats the nonprofit’s former VP of development has accomplished during his almost 13 years leading the institution. The result is an international attraction that averages more than 500,000 visitors a year and registered an annual economic impact of $242 million in 2024, up from $107 million in 2012. 

Ironically, the Rock Hall’s board of trustees embarked on a nationwide search for departing president and CEO Terry Stewart’s successor before they realized the right man for the job was already in the house. And he had a true rock 'n' roll heart, notes retired Sherwin-Williams chairman and CEO Chris Connor, who’s served as a trustee since 2002. He’d left Temple University for a time to open and operate a record shop, played guitar in garage bands, and toured with a folksy combo as a road manager.

“If you just wiped the name off and handed in (Greg’s) resume … you’d say ‘Stop the search! We’ve got him!’” he says with a chuckle. 

Harris already had proven himself at building relationships with the community, growing membership, fundraising and planning events. He’d led the teams that staged the 2009 and 2012 induction weeks in Cleveland, financial successes that, combined with other moneymaking events and increased donor contributions, helped make the Rock Hall a self-sustaining entity. He cites an operating revenue of over $36 million a year, up from $14 million in 2013. Connor attributes Harris’s “warm, affable, engaging” ability to drum up donor and music-industry support to proven leadership that, together with the self-confidence he exudes, engenders trust.

Chuck D, inducted into the Rock Hall with the hip-hop group Public Enemy in 2013, first met Harris while he was working to secure a place for hip-hop in the museum. The rapper remembers Harris’s desire to honor the genre instead of simply appropriating it for institutional gain, to include artists who had yet to be inducted in the process, and to learn rather than assume or adopt biases.

“He is a conductor — he lets the music speak for itself,” he says. “But in case of emergency, he’s there to speak for the music.” 

One of the first things Harris did to boost attendance from a “flat” 300,000 was to lift a general photography ban. The resulting surge of visitors’ social media posts increased digital marketing. Capital campaign dollars not earmarked for funding the expansion were used to update existing square footage, an effort that continues today. Connor singles out the donor-sponsored Garage, a space Harris helped design, where visitors can play Fender and Gibson guitars at stations along a wall of exposed 2-by-4s and jam with each other in a glass-enclosed studio. 

Analytics were employed to better define the Rock Hall’s audience and develop exhibits such as the current multigenerational draw SNL: Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of Music. 

Under Harris’s direction, the Rock Hall amped up a digital-learning platform that reaches close to 1.5 million students a year, put traveling exhibits on the road and cultivated collaborations with the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — a relationship that yielded Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll, displayed first at the Met in 2019 and then the Rock Hall. 

Some would consider the expansion’s completion, slated for next fall, as the perfect note on which to end a career. But Harris doesn’t foresee trading the Rock Hall for a rocking chair, even as he turns 60 this year.

“There’s too much to do!” he exclaims. “There’s more concerts and inductions. And there’s more fans to engage and inspire with rock and roll.”  

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