Monitor is hosting a cocktail reception to introduce and celebrate Diana Smith’s new book, Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength (Portfolio/Penguin USA, May 2008). This book draws on Diana’s 25 years of experience advising top teams to reveal what really makes or breaks the success of leaders and their teams. 

Limited space. Please RSVP to james_park@monitor.com by May 15, 2008 

Diana McLain Smith is a partner at the Monitor Group. For the past seven years, she has served as the chair of Human Dynamics and Change at Monitor University, where she teaches, consults, and conducts research. She is also a founding partner of Action Design, which specializes in organizational learning and professional development. 

For over 25 years, Smith has observed and advised top teams in organizations across sectors and geographies. In each case she’s sought to understand and transform the way people in teams handle “hot topics”—topics so complex and controversial they threaten to destroy teams and bring progress to a halt. Smith has written about teams and intervention for as many years as she has practiced. Her most recent work can be found in the California Management Review (“Too Hot to Handle? How to Manage Relationship Conflict,” coauthored Fall 2006 with Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School), in Peter Senge’s The Dance of Change (“Climbing Out of the Muck” and “The Muck Stops Here”), and in Brown and Wiig’s Corporate Communication (“Keeping a Strategic Dialogue Moving”). While earning her doctoral degree at Harvard, she coauthored a classic text on intervention with Chris Argyris and Robert W. Putnam (Action Science).