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Jim Shinn is Lecturer at Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests include radical innovation, risk management, corporate governance, and decision-making under uncertainty.
After several years with Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and Tokyo, Jim served in the East Asia Bureau of the State Department from 1976~79 and then spent fifteen years as a manager and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. After several years at Advanced Micro Devices, working in the microprocessor division and then running the Japan operations, he co-founded Dialogic, a voice processing software firm, which did an IPO in 1992. After Dialogic he worked with several technology firms as both outside director and investor, including Haystack Labs and Longitude.
He went on from Silicon Valley to be the Senior Fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1993~96.
From 2007~8 he served as Assistant Secretary for Asia in the Department of Defense, where his area of policy responsibility ranged from Herat to Honolulu and included the War in Afghanistan. Before coming to the Pentagon, he was the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, first at the Central Intelligence Agency and then for the Director of National Intelligence, from 2004~2006.
His recent publications include Political Power and Corporate Control, co-authored with Peter Gourevitch (Princeton University Press 2005); “The Great Recession’s Impact on Global Corporate Governance” in Corporate Governance and the Global Financial Crisis, Edward Sun, editor (Cambridge University Press 2011); “Trading Bets: Political Spin” in Institutional Investor (March 2011); “Future Shocks: Political Risk Reference Scenarios” in Institutional Investor (June 2011); “Weighing Up the Risks as China’s Power Grows” in Institutional Investor (September 2011), and Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer, with James Dobbins (RAND Press, 2011).
Jim currently serves on the board of directors of CSBA and MoDo Labs, and on the advisory boards of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance; Oxford Analytica, the UK-based analysis group; Global Strategic Associates LLC (GSA), a New York-based financial advisory firm with an emphasis on East Asia; and CQS, a London-based hedge fund.
He has a BA from Princeton, MBA from Harvard, and PhD from Princeton.
