Marvin Zonis was the first professor at Chicago Booth 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.
Zonis is a cofounder and chairman of DSD, a software development company based in Moscow and Chicago. He is a member of the board of directors for several technology-based companies, including Go2Call and CNA Financial. He has written extensively on globalization, digital technologies, emerging markets, Middle Eastern politics, the oil industry, Russia, and U.S. foreign policy.
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.
His writings have been published, among other places, in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, 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, and The Political Elite of Iran. He also has appeared on various programs, including Nightline, and CNN's Larry King Live and is interviewed regularly on National Public Radio. Zonis is the international editor of WBBM-TV, Chicago, and was the Middle East Consultant to ABC/Capital Cities television.
Zonis shows his students an appreciation for the importance of the role of emotions in business and the need to listen to and understand others. He tries to teach a number of soft skills to round out his students' educations. "The challenge for me," says Zonis, "is to keep the students engaged while they learn these new skills and appreciate their significance to their futures and the future of their firms."
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 Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago, where he received psychoanalytic training.
Selected Publications
With Dan Lefkovitz and Sam Wilkin, The Kimchi Matters (Agate, October 2003).
With Dwight Semler, The East European Business Opportunity: A Complete Guide and Sourcebook (John Wiley and Sons, 1992).
Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
"Political Instability in the 1980s: A Model of Revolutionary Change," Political Psychology (winter 1985).
The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton University Press, 1971).
