Paul Kinsinger, Senior Associate
Paul Kinsinger is a Senior Associate with Limitless Actualization, helping senior executives and their organizations understand how to navigate the challenges and opportunities posed by the powerful megatrends driving today’s fast-moving, highly disruptive, complex, and ambiguous global business environment. With deep and broad experience and expertise over careers in the US national security community and as an executive educator with the Thunderbird School of Global Management (where he is now an Emeritus Faculty member), Paul specializes in how to think strategically, drive agile decision-making, and lead in these unprecedented times.
His current areas of endeavor include helping leaders to adapt their organizations and strategies to the increasingly turbulent times created by the speed of change and the impact of the globalization of opportunity and access. His particular focus is on aiding incumbents prepare for and embrace the era of disruption, where exponential thinking must co-exist with the linear.
Tempered by advanced international studies and executive-level management in the US national security arena, Paul’s expertise is grounded in a relentless focus on understanding the impact of external forces through the “outside-in, future-back” thinking that few businesses can afford to short-change anymore. His combination of experience with complex global issues and understanding of today’s business imperatives gives him the ability to make “outside-in, future-back" thinking tangible and actionable to executives seeking to successfully navigate increasingly dynamic opportunities and challenges. With executive-level experience ranging from Kings, Presidents, and Prime Ministers as well to C-suite business leaders, Paul knows how to challenge conventional wisdom, to provoke new thinking, to provide discreet counsel, and “to speak truth to power”—as captured by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who praised Paul’s frankness and candor.
Paul has worked with corporate clients at various executive levels and across several industries, including hi-tech, defense, energy, petrochemicals, construction, shipping, agriculture, consumer goods, and the public sector. With an “in-the-trenches” mindset, Paul educates in a highly applied, hands-on manner designed to allow executives to experience, on their own or in teams, the use of tools and methods that emanate from the best of thought leadership—be it from business, academia, consultancies, or from government—and to develop impactful outcomes. Paul is an integrative thinker and highly collaborative colleague who excels in co-design and co-delivery models that focus on the complex and overlapping challenges learners actually face, as well as on a facilitative approach that allows greater self-realization and application.
Paul holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s Degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. Paul has written extensively on navigating these turbulent times and on the use of market and competitive intelligence. He is also frequently called upon by local and national media to comment on events in the Middle East. Paul has lived in Europe and traveled to over 40 countries worldwide.