Peter A.C. Smith

As President of The Leadership Alliance Inc. (TLA), Peter Smith maintains a worldwide consulting practice assisting leading public and private sector organizations enhance performance by optimizing activities related to critical innovation and sustainability drivers such as knowledge management, organizational learning, entrepreneurship, and complexity leadership.

Through his research and practice in Network Visualization & Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Complex Adaptive Systems, and other emerging paradigms, Peter has developed unique in-depth expertise in cross-organizational learning and knowledge sharing, collaborative community development, and the identification of Opinion Leaders and Innovation Champions – 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 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 strategic capital, knowledge management, organizational learning, social capital, entrepreneurialism, innovation, networks, complex systems, complexity leadership, and related emerging paradigms.