Martin Kihn

Martin Kihn is an author and digital marketer currently serving as the Senior Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing Cloud at Salesforce. From July of 2013 to July of 2018, Kihn served as Vice President, Research.

In the late 1990s, Kihn was head writer for the popular television program "Pop-Up Video" on MTV Networks and was nominated for an Emmy for Writing. He lost to Win Ben Stein’s "Money," decided to quit writing and started business school. Ironically enough, the tragicomic world of American business, where everybody seemed to be speaking an impressive language that was not quite English, and not quite clear, provided him with a whole new vein of source material, and his writing career really took off.

Kihn’s first book was a humorous expose of the consulting industry called "House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time," based on the three years he spent working for a large consultancy. The Economist said “a more entertaining book about business is unlikely to appear for a long time,” and Salon.com called it “exceedingly smart and funny." In 2012, "House of Lies" was made into a Showtime series starring Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell.

Kihn followed up a few years later with a grotesquely satirical stunt-memoir called "A$$hole: How I Got Rich & Happy By Not Giving a Damn About Anyone." The premise of this reality TV-type firebomb was that a guy who is too nice to get ahead in business (aka Marty) decides systematically to turn himself into a jerk and reap the rewards. Of "A$$hole," Booklist raved “Kihn’s got a great ear for dialogue -- and a comedic sense worthy of Second City.”

Born in Zambia, Kihn grew up in suburban Michigan and holds a bachelor's degree in Theater Studies from Yale and an MBA from Columbia Business School. His articles have appeared in New York, the New York Times, GQ, Us, Details, Cosmopolitan, and Forbes, and he was on the staff of Spy, Forbes, New York, and Vibe.