Milan Zeleny

As of December 2013 he has served on editorial or advisory boards of

In 2012, he declared his intention to run for presidency of the Czech Republic, but then withdrew from the presidential election race. He has been a resident of Tenafly, New Jersey.

In Zeleny's book, Human Systems Management: Integrating Knowledge, Management and Systems, World Scientific, 2005 (reprint 2008), he summarizes knowledge as purposeful coordination of action and its implications for the global economics and management. Zeleny also indicates how the sector evolution from agriculture, industry, services and government leads to self-service and disintermediation, the first manifestations of the transformation in economics, which refers to the long-term movement from globalization to the relocalization of economic activities and mass customization of global market.

According to Hirsch Citation and Publication Index, Zeleny was the most cited Czech economist as of 2005. Since 1992, Zeleny constantly appears in the listings of Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in America (also in the East, in the World and of Professionals).

Among his other adjunct and visiting positions was a visiting professorship of environmental economics at Architettonici ed Ambientali, Dipartimento di Conservazione dei beni, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy, 1993.

Since 1982, Zeleny has served as professor of management systems at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York City. He also accepted his permanent tenured appointment from Fordham University.

During the years between 1971 and 1982, Zeleny worked as a lecturer at several universities: assistant professor of statistics and management science at University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. (1971–1972), associate professor of business administration at Columbia University, New York, (1972–1979), professor of economics at Copenhagen School of Economics, Copenhagen, Denmark, (1979–1980) and professor of management science at European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM), Brussels, Belgium, (1980–1981).

Prior to 1967, Zeleny's research involved Critical Path Analysis. In 1972 he initiated research on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Later he devoted himself to the field of Knowledge Management, and released the first publication in this field in 1987. Other areas of research include Games with multiple payoffs, Integrated Process Management (IPM), Knowledge-based theory of fuzzy sets, Baťa System of Management, High-technology management, Mass customization, Portfolio selection, Risk analysis, Measurement of consumer attitudes, Human intuition, Creativity and judgment, Simulation models of biological organization, Autopoiesis, Artificial life (AL), Osmotic growths and synthetic biology, Spontaneous social organizations and early computer modeling (via GPSS, APL, FORTRAN and BASIC).

Milan Zeleny (born January 22, 1942) is a Czech American economist, currently a professor of management systems at Fordham University, New York City. He has done research in the field of decision-making, productivity, knowledge management, and business economics. Zeleny is also a visiting professor at the Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic, and has been academic vice dean and professor at Xidian University in Xi’an, China. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei in 2006, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in 2007, and at IBMEC in Rio de Janeiro in 2009–10. For many years he has lectured at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Naples.

Zeleny was born on January 22, 1942, in a small village of Klucké Chvalovice in eastern Bohemia. He came from the literary family of Vácslav and Vladivoj Zelený. His father, Josef Zelený, founded one of the first organizational consulting firms in the 1930s and 1940s in Prague ("ZET-organizace"). After the communist takeover in 1948, his father became a coal miner (in Kladno) and his uncle worked in the uranium mines of Jáchymov. After studies at the University of Economics, Prague (1959–1964), military service in Prague, and a few years at the Czech Academy of Sciences, he left the communist Czechoslovakia in 1967 to expand his education for Ph.D. in Operations Research and Business Economics at the University of Rochester, where he also received his M.S. in Systems Management in 1970.