Brief Bio

Diana McLain Smith is a partner at the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm, where she teaches, consults, and conducts research. She is also a founding partner of Action Design, which specializes in organizational learning and professional development.

For as many years as Smith has practiced, she’s written on teams. Her more recent work can be found in The California Management Review (“Too Hot to Handle?” coauthored with Amy Edmondson), in Peter Senge’s The Dance of Change (“Climbing Out of the Muck” and “The Muck Stops Here”), and in Brown and Wiig’s Corporate Communication (“Keeping a Strategic Dialogue Moving”). Early on, while earning her doctoral degree at Harvard, she co-authored a classic book on intervention theory with Chris Argyris and Robert Putnam.

Smith has taught courses and delivered lectures at the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Boston College’s Carroll School of Management.