Nice to Meet You
Founder of Mentee Insight
Katsiaryna Zinavenka
Katsiaryna is a lawyer who brings strategic thinking skills to her advocacy for a healthy professional environment by applying structured analysis to eliminate organizational inefficiencies and deliver top-quality services to clients. Katsiaryna's championship chess-playing in her native country Belarus gave her a strong early start in robust action strategic thinking. At the beginning of her law career, Katsiaryna found sharp applications for those skills as part of the leadership team that turned around a firm burdened with a mountain of inherited tax debt and positioned it on a path to successful growth. Advocating for that firm, an incubator for high-tech startups, as its only lawyer, her job called for constant strategic judgment weighing legal and business risks including whether and when to start court proceedings. Upon making a challenging transition to the U.S. Katsiaryna had to make even more strategic judgments, now advocating for herself to survive and flourish in a new society and achieve a professional position giving her the strategic flexibility to take original initiatives.
Katsiaryna's track record, made possible by her systematic application of structured strategic thinking to her own well-being, has led her to take on a new advocacy challenge. As a keen observer of professional environments on both sides of the Atlantic, she constantly asks herself how it is possible that, with many helping resources available, so many professionals are not on top of their well-being. That tendency is a tragedy for many talented individuals. It also has far-reaching consequences for inefficiencies and underproductivity in professional environments, arising in many countries and societies. Katsiaryna believes that, by harnessing the power of strategic thinking at all levels across an organization, these problems are avoidable and workable solutions can be found. To make constructive changes, she brings her chess mind, a strategist's flair for robust action, and structured analytical, negotiating, and planning skills honed on her law background and business experience in both Europe and America. To that end, Katsiaryna has founded Mentee Insight to foster Strategist Identity Development across organizations and industries in the AI era, where professionals unlock their strategic potential along with energy management skills to stay on top of their well-being, with a healthy and productive environment as a byproduct.
Attorney Katsiaryna Zinavenka, a lawyer in two legal systems, holds her LLM from Boston University School of Law's Graduate Tax Program, where she received merit-based awards, including the Frederic G. Corneel scholarship (named after a tax lawyer who received the American Bar Association's Distinguished Service Award for his exemplary leadership on behalf of the tax bar and the profession).
Email: kzinavenka@menteeinsight.com
Mentee Insight Leader
Professor Scott Boorman
Professor Boorman brings deep expertise in applying a combination of strategic analysis and social network analysis to identify coherent analytical structures in messy, amorphous organizational situations. Professor Boorman has a track record of identifying such analytical structure in diverse problem areas where little or no coherent structure has previously been recognized and then using analysis based on that structure to point leaders of many backgrounds to creative ways of eliminating inefficiencies in their own organizations. Here, Professor Boorman brings both legal background and pattern recognition experience to operating in a wide range of complex organizations and institutions, ranging from the IRS to parts of the U.S. defense establishment and other organizations. Professor Boorman's ability to discover analytical structure and apply it to practical problems is exemplified in his recent book Three Faces of Sun Tzu: Analyzing Sun Tzu's Art of War, a Manual on Strategy (Cambridge, 2024), which provides a structured analysis covering both parts of Sun Tzu's famous imperative: know the other and know yourself.
Professor Boorman advocates for a healthy professional environment at whose core is knowing yourself, a challenge on which Sun Tzu notably failed to give much guidance, as the foundation for creating and leading an efficient organization. Building on his extensive naval research background, Professor Boorman applies logistics analysis to address challenges faced by leaders of organizations that are so complex that they continually threaten to escape rational control. To implement constructive changes that advance healthy organizational environments, Professor Boorman's expertise in mathematical and computational algorithms gives the capacity to create maps of social networks, enabling leaders to bring a plethora of data into sharp focus to support their management decisions. That structured analysis delivers a double-barreled product. First, it enables leaders to see the "big picture" in ways they otherwise couldn't do, shining a light on complex patterns of inefficiencies in networks and ways of addressing them. Second, it also enables leaders to identify individuals, commonly few in number, who through their strategic ties and positions are often the key to organizational success or failure.
Professor Boorman earned degrees in Applied Mathematics and Sociology from Harvard (where, early in his career, he was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Additional background on Professor Boorman's professional career and interests may be found at https://sociology.yale.edu/people/scott-boorman.
Email: sboorman@menteeinsight.com
Disclaimer
Mentee Insight does NOT provide legal services. The protection of a client-lawyer relationship does NOT exist with respect to the nonlegal services provided. The information provided on this website does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice or tax advice.
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