Brief Bio

For the past 25 years, Diana McLain Smith has advised leaders on how to target and build strategically critical relationships in and outside their organizations. She is the Chief Executive Partner at New Profit Inc. Before joining New Profit, she was a partner at the Monitor Group and a founding partner of Action Design.

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.