Expert on microtrends
and social entrepreneurship.



Highlights

Kinney Zalesne is coauthor with Mark Penn of the groundbreaking book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, and of the monthly Wall Street Journal column by the same title.

She is an authority on the dozens of emerging communities whose tastes and lifestyles are shaping our future.

She also has deep experience with social entrepreneurship, the application of entrepreneurial principles to solve social problems and effect social change.

Ms. Zalesne has worked at the highest levels of the private sector, the public sector and the nonprofit sector. She offers audiences an unusual and cross-cutting take on how society works in these sectors, how the sectors relate to each other, and how they can work together to take us forward.

Private sector. Ms. Zalesne first worked with Mark Penn at the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland on the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, for which he was chief pollster and strategist, and she returned to work with him in 2005 on Microtrends.

Public sector. Kinney was a White House Fellow in 1995-1996, serving in Vice President Al Gore’s office, where she focused on domestic policy and education technology. She also served as Counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno from 1996 to 1999.

Nonprofit sector. Ms. Zalesne left the Justice Department to become deputy director of College Summit, which has won the highest awards given to nonprofits, including the Social Capital Award from Fast Company in the past five years running. She has also been executive vice president of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

Kinney Zalesne graduated cum laude from both Yale University and Harvard Law School, where she was Barack Obama's classmate. She has clerked for a senior judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia.

Microtrends

Understand the invisible trends that are shaping the (potential) future of your organization.

Microtrends is about the niching of society. People are self-defining in smaller and smaller ways, and neither “gut sense” nor conventional wisdom will likely get you to the truth. Go straight to the numbers, and let’s do some microtrending.

Especially in hard times, no one can afford fat in their message—it must be all the more targeted. In her column and book Microtrends, Kinney Zalesne describes trends that no one else sees, small groups that no one else has their eye on that are making huge changes in business, politics, and our personal lives.

In her evidence-based, data-driven approach to understanding our future, Ms. Zalesne describes who makes up these micro-communities and explains why they matter and how you can reach them with your message. Audiences consistently find this material, not just personally intriguing but also invaluable to their organization, because this kind of targeted information is more critical than ever to strategic leaders in all sectors.

The book Microtrends was released in paperback in April 2009 with all-new updated chapters.

Credentials

• Coauthor, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes
• Coauthor, Microtrends column, Wall Street Journal
• White House Fellow
• Counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno
• President and executive vice president of two national social-change organizations,
• College Summit and Hillel
• Former Assistant District Attorney
• Honors graduate, Harvard Law School and Yale University