PETER A.C. SMITH

 

Peter A.C. Smith is President of The Leadership Alliance Inc. (TLA), a wholly “complex adaptive systems” based consortium of Associates. As a TLA Associate, Peter himself maintains a worldwide consulting practice assisting leading public and private sector organizations enhance their performance.

Through his research and practice in leadership development, Network Visualization & Analysis, Social Network Analysis, and Complex Adaptive Systems, Peter has developed unique understanding and in-depth expertise in emerging leadership paradigms, and in the essentials of formal and informal leadership in organizational settings. This includes very practical methods for the identification of informal Opinion Leaders and Initiative/Change Champions (the people in the organization “that really get things done”) which enables their views to be explored and their influence leveraged appropriately – keys to enhancing Social Capital and successfully implementing any significant organizational undertaking.
 

Prior to establishing his consulting practice Peter held various senior positions with Exxon in New York and across North America in I/T, HR, R&D, Operations, and Mathematics. In 1990 as an Exxon representative he was one of the founding associates of Peter Senge’s Organizational Learning Center (OLC) at MIT, and during the period 1990-94, first as an Exxon representative and later as an independent consultant for TLA, he participated in various systems thinking, microcomputer simulation, and system dynamics activities and projects through the OLC. During this period he also became a TLA associate of Interact, the Philadelphia-based consultancy headed by Dr. Russel Ackoff. and Dr. Jamshid Gharajedaghi.

 

Peter is a Member, Centre for Business Information, Organisation & Process Management, at University of Westminster Business School, UK. He has served as Professor of Management Learning Processes with the Canadian School of Management, as Executive Director of The International Foundation for Action Learning- Canada, and as Chair of the International Community of Action Learners. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, and Consulting and Special Issues Editor of The Learning Organization.  He is also Associate Editor (Practitioners) for the International Journal of Sociotechnology & Knowledge Management. Peter has had published more than fifty academic papers on a broad range of topics related to performance enhancement, including chapters in “The Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice in Information & Knowledge Management”, “The Handbook of Business Strategy” and ““Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design And Social Networking Systems”. Peter is a member of the Canadian Society for Training & Development and is in demand internationally as a speaker, workshop leader and conference chair.

 

The breadth of Peter’s practical hands-on management experience has proven invaluable in ensuring that he can relate to the problems and pressures faced by organizations in today’s complex and ambiguous global environments, and it is fundamental to framing his research interests which include leadership development, opinion leaders, strategic capital, knowledge management, organizational learning, social capital, right for market, entrepreneurism, innovation, supply chain management, networks, complex systems, complexity leadership, and related emerging paradigms.

 

Email:             pasmith@tlainc.com

Tel Canada:    +1 (905) 908-2172

Cel Canada:   +1 (905) 806-6321

Mob UK:        +44 (0)7762155747

Mail:               The Leadership Alliance Inc.

                        2 – 30 Laguna Parkway

Brechin, Ontario L0K 1B0

CANADA

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Last updated on Friday, August 28, 2009; for day-to-day details see Peter's LinkedIn profile