Micah Zenko

Micah Zenko is the Director of Research and Learning at the McChrystal Group. In this role, he works with clients to improve organizational performance through red teaming, strategic planning, and scenario development.

Often called “thinking like the enemy,” red teaming is the process of using a group inside your company to challenge existing strategy, find weaknesses or potential pitfalls, and get ahead of them. Using tailored strategies to help leaders and teams explore and understand their vulnerabilities and future opportunities, Zenko facilitates difficult, open dialogues by asking probing questions of both C-level and entry-level teams. His tactics get companies to rethink strategies and consider challenges they otherwise wouldn’t, opening up new channels of conversation and producing “Aha!” moments that can be transformative to company culture and help organizations identify and exploit their unique competitive advantages. Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau, Zenko uses fascinating military and corporate case studies to showcase how cognitive biases impair our ability to identify and fix strategic blind spots before they spin out of control, underline why “best practices” aren’t always so, and illustrate how to get ahead of would-be-crises before they occur using red teaming.

Zenko is the author of the book, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. He is the first person to write an all-encompassing book about the phenomenon of red teaming, and his research for the book included more than five years and 250 interviews with leaders and disruptors including hackers, officers from the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau and the CIA Red Cell. Zenko’s research sits at the intersection of human behavior and business strategy with the goal of helping companies challenge existing assumptions and assess the potential adversarial perspective.

In addition to his work with the McChrystal Group, Zenko is also the Whitehead Senior Fellow at Chatham House, a London-based NGO whose mission is to analyze and promote the understanding of international issues and current affairs. Prior to joining the McChrystal Group, Zenko also served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he researched and published on a range of national security and foreign policy issues. Zenko has also previously held positions with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, Veterans for America, and the Brookings Institution.

In addition to his book Red Team, Zenko is the author of Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans and Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Operations in the Post-Cold War World. His articles have been published in major publications including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Business Insider. Zenko has a Doctorate degree in Political Science from Brandeis University.

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