Wendy Smith

WENDY K. SMITH is the Dana J. Johnson professor of management and faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. She is also the coauthor of a new book just released in August 2022 Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her intensive research on strategic paradoxes—how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory, yet interdependent demands. Working with executives globally, she has been a noted keynote speaker and teacher for audiences around the world. Her research, published among the top journals in the field, has received numerous awards including the Web of Science Highly Cited Research Award (2019, 2020 and 2021) for being among the 1 percent most-cited researchers in her field. Smith lives in Philadelphia with her husband, three children, and the family dog.