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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, and decision-making under uncertainty. He is also the CEO of Teneo Intelligence, the analytics arm of the New York-based Teneo, a strategic communications firm.
After working for 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. Based on his experience 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, and was ultimately acquired by the Intel Corporation in 1999. After Dialogic he worked with several technology firms as both outside director and investor, including Haystack Labs (acquired by TIS) and Longitude (acquired by Goldman Sachs).
Jim went on from Silicon Valley to be the Senior Fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1993~96. From the CFR he went back to Princeton and completed his PhD in middle age, writing a dissertation on the links between capital market integration and corporate governance institutions — after then-Professor Benjamin Bernanke taught him open economy macroeconomics and Jim re-learned how to use quantitative methods. He then taught in Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences until 9/11.
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, notably, 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. Prior to the CIA he served in the U.S. Mission to the UN in 2001~2.
Jim writes regularly on political risk and portfolio management for Institutional Investor magazine. Other more academic publications include “The Great Recession’s Impact on Global Corporate Governance” in Corporate Governance and the Global Financial Crisis, Edward Sun, editor (Cambridge University Press 2011) and Afghan Peace Talks: A Primer, with James Dobbins (RAND Press, 2011). His book on corporate governance, Political Power and Corporate Control, co-authored with Peter Gourevitch (Princeton University Press 2005), is still in print.
Jim currently serves on the board of directors of MoDo Labs, a Boston-based MIT spin-out in mobile computing middleware, and Monitor 360, a San Francisco-based security consulting firm. He serves on the advisory boards of 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.
