Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jack Perkowski is a graduate of North Catholic High School. He attended Yale University on a football scholarship and received the Gordon Brown Memorial Prize, which is awarded each year to the outstanding member of the Junior Class. After graduating from Yale in 1970, he attended Harvard Business School, where he received an MBA degree with high distinction and was designated a Baker Scholar. He spent 21 years as an investment banker at Paine Webber, where he raised $300 million of equity for Paine Webber in the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash of October 19, 1987 known as "Black Monday".

In 1994, Jack Perkowski founded ASIMCO, an automotive components company based in Beijing, China. Under Perkowski's leadership, ASIMCO was twice named one of the “Ten Best Employers in China,” ranking third, in the last survey conducted by Hewitt Associates and 21st Century Business Herald. In 2008, he was named one of "30 Outstanding Entrepreneurs in China's Auto Components Industry Over the Country's 30 Years of Economic Reform," by China Auto News, the only foreigner to receive such distinction.

In 2009, Jack Perkowski established JFP Holdings, a merchant bank for China, to help global companies develop and implement their China strategies and to assist Chinese companies develop global footprints.

Jack Perkowski was featured in the best-selling book A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman. In 2008, he authored Managing the Dragon: How I’m Building a Billion Dollar Business in China, published by Crown Business.