Lecture – The power of paradox: adopting both/and thinking for effective social entrepreneurship

Part of a guest lecture series organised by the Master of Studies in Social Innovation and the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation.

Join our cohort of MSt in Social Innovation students for an open guest lecture with Professor Wendy Smith.

Social entrepreneurs continually face tensions between their social mission and business purpose. In this lecture, Wendy draws of over 25 years of research to argue that our typical either/or approaches to tensions can be limiting at best and detrimental at worst. She introduces the scholarship on both/and thinking as an alternative approach to enable more creative and sustainable outcomes.

Speaker bio

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 earned her PhD in organisational behaviour 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 and scholars globally, she received the Web of Science Highly Cited Research Award (2019, 2020 and 2021) for being among the 1% most-cited researchers in her field and received the Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review for the most cited paper in the past 10 years. Her work has been published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, and Management Science. She integrates her research into her book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. She has taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania–Wharton while helping senior leaders and middle managers all over the world address issues of interpersonal dynamics, team performance, organisational change, and innovation. Wendy lives in Philadelphia with her husband, three children, and the family dog.

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