Marvin Zonis

Contact Marvin Zonis

Marvin Zonis is professor emeritus at The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

At Chicago Booth, Dr. Zonis continues to teach courses on international political economy, leadership, and e-commerce. He was the first professor at the business school to teach a course on the effects of digital technologies on global business. He also consults to corporations and professional asset management firms throughout the world, helping them to identify, assess, and manage their political risks in the changing global environment. Dr. Zonis is a co-founder and chairman of DSD, a software development company based in Moscow and Chicago. He is a member of the board of directors of CNA Financial, the global insurance and financial services firm and on the board of advisors of Syntek, a European private equity venture capital firm focusing on TMT (telecom, media and technology). He is a fellow of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, a global technology consulting firm, a member of the board of directors of the Fondation Etats Unis in Paris, France, and on the board of advisers of the Centre for Business Management at Queen Mary University of London in England.

What unites these activities is Dr. Zonis’ unique awareness of the intersections of politics, economics, and emergent technologies. He argues that global economic decline generates pervasive feelings of humiliation, anxiety, and mistrust. Those, in turn, will generate widespread political instability. Governments will be toppled, the economic decline of those countries will accelerate and foreign investment will seek other investable countries, diminishing long-term economic growth. In a world of economic decline, technologies multiply the downward spiral while economically, cross border financial flows and business outsourcing to lower cost countries, for example, have begun to decline – major factors driving the decline of the global economy. One result is the massive shrinking of cross border trade. The instability and humiliation, which in turn drives rage, will generate more recruits for terrorism. The face of these global economic, political, and financial challenges, business leadership, and a true understanding of what defines leadership, is more essential than ever.

Dr. Zonis has written extensively on globalization, digital technologies, emerging markets, Middle Eastern politics, the oil industry, Russia, and U.S. foreign policy. He is a leading authority on the Middle East, and has spent the last 40 years studying the volatile mix of Islam, terrorism, and the Middle East. He is the former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Chicago. He has lived in Iran, hitchhiked through Afghanistan in the 1960s, studied Islam in Iraq beginning in 1964, and has traveled extensively throughout other parts of the region, as well.

His writings have been published, among other places, in The Financial Times, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Chief Executive Magazine, La Vanguardia, The Boston Globe, and the Japanese journal Nikkei Weekly. His books include The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis Driven World, The Eastern European Opportunity, Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and The Political Elite of Iran. Dr. Zonis has appeared on numerous network television news programs, including “Nightline” and CNN’s “Larry King Live”, and is interviewed regularly on National Public Radio. He is the international editor of WBBM-TV, Chicago and was the Middle East consultant to ABC/Capital Cities television.

Dr. Zonis was educated at Yale University, Harvard Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a Ph.D. in political science, and the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago where he received psychoanalytic training. His website is http://www.marvinzonis.com.

Contact Marvin Zonis