'User: Billgmclain'
Marvin Zonis
Marvin Zonis is an American global political economist and expert on Middle Eastern politics and history.
He is an emeritus Professor at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business where he currently teaches courses on international political economy, leadership, and electronic commerce.
Dr. Zonis is also the head of Marvin Zonis + Associates, Inc., a political risk consultancy.
The firm works with corporations and professional asset management firms throughout the world to help them identify, assess, and manage their political risks in the constantly changing global environment.
Zonis is a member of the Board of Directors of CNA Financial, the global insurance and financial services firm, and is also on the Board of Advisors of Syntek Capital, 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 and also a member of the Board of Directors of the Fondation Etats Unis, Paris and the Board of Advisers of the Centre for Business Management, Queen Mary, University of London.
Professor Zonis is the author of numerous books and articles including The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis-Driven World, The East European Opportunity: The Complete Business Guide and Sourcebook, Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, and The Political Elite of Iran.
He was educated at Yale University, the Harvard Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in political science in 1968, and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he received training as a psychoanalyst.
A leading authority on the Middle East, Zonis 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.
Marvin 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.
Summary of Selected Publications
In The Kimchi Matters (Agate, 2003), Zonis and his co-authors Dan Lefkovitz and Sam Wilkin recommend that before investors commit capital to emerging markets it is critical to understand the local dynamics of economic, political, and cultural structures and conditions. They use the example of how Microsoft apparently had what looked to be a proven strategy of partnering with a local word-processing software firm in South Korea only to find that local opposition to the perceived quasi-colonialism of this broke the deal. Hence the title - kimchi is a spicy Korean food made of cabbage little known outside of Korea but a central dish in its cuisine. If one were to open a fast food chain such as McDonald's in South Korea without knowing that kimchi was a central condiment in the food Koreans prefer, that venture would probably fail.
One must get to know and understand local preferences and ways of doing business before attempting to enter a new national market. Investors must also understand the dynamic between the government and the economy, again in very local and specific terms.
The Kimchi Matters examines how certain institutions are necessary for economic development and what historical factors promote such institutions. These institutions include the rule of law rather than of despots, especially the impersonal enforcement of contracts by courts and transparent regulation of the economy. An uncorrupted and adequately compensated bureaucracy is also necessary.
In The East European Opportunity: The Complete Business Guide and Sourcebook (Wiley, 1992), Zonis and co-author Dwight Semler outlined business opportunities in six Eastern European countries during the post-Soviet transition era.
Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah (University of Chicago Press, 1991) is a psychoanalytic portrait of the late Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980) who Marvin Zonis knew personally. Zonis contends that as the Shah's core psychological relationships failed in the 1970's he regressed into his essential passivity and dependence, making him incapable of facing the challenge from the Iranian Revolution. The main sources of the Shah's narcissistic supply that maintained his psychic equilibrium were the admiration of his subjects, several friendships dating from childhood, a belief in special divine protection, and his alliance with the United States government. The range of psychoanalytic interpretation in the book is impressive and fine-grained; one chapter looks at the Shah's obsessions with flying and heights, another examines his relationships with his father and mother. While he was much closer to his mother, the Shah only mentions her 12 times in the first volume of his autobiography while he references his father 784 times.
The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton University Press, 1971) is an examination of the political class of Iran up until the late Sixties. Zonis studied not only those who held formal office, but identified approximately three thousand people who exercised significant influence over the allocation of resources and values. He classified the ten percent of this group who exercised the most influence as his data universe. The interactions between the Shah and this group were then investigated. Zonis managed to interview a large cross section of this elite group. He concluded that the longer members of this elite group of 300 participated in the Shah's political system, the more likely they were to exhibit attributes of insecurity, cynicism, and mistrust.
A comprehensive bibliography is forthcoming.
Websites:
http://www.MarvinZonis.com/
http://www.kimchimatters.com/
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/bio.aspx?person_id=12826030080
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/busecon/busfac/Zonis.html
http://www.diamondconsultants.com/PublicSite/people/team/?topic=Diamond%20Fellows&name=Marvin%20Zonis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Management_%26_Technology_Consultants
http://investor.cna.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=104503&p=irol-govhighlights
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/chicago_council_event_past_prog_detail.php?eventid=2080