Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith is a professor of management at the Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics and co-director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the University of Delaware.

Smith earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, the University of Delaware M.B.A. Teaching Award, University of Delaware’s first Mid-Career Excellence in Scholarship Award, and the Lerner College Outstanding Scholar Award. She teaches leadership, organizational behavior, business ethics, managing interpersonal dynamics and strategic paradoxes, emotional intelligence, high-performing teams, organizational change and innovation, and crisis management.

Smith’s research focuses on strategic paradoxes and how leaders and senior management teams effectively respond to contradictory agendas. She studies how organizations and their leaders simultaneously explore new possibilities while exploiting existing competencies and how social enterprises simultaneously attend to social missions and financial goals. Her research has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Harvard Business Review.

Smith’s book Both/And Thinking was published by Harvard Business School Press in August 2022. View her TEDx-UD talk, “The Power of Paradox.”