Geoff Smart

Geoffrey Hudson “Geoff” Smart (born October 7, 1972) is Chairman & CEO of ghSMART & Company, Inc. He is also a bestselling author  and social entrepreneur. His professional mission is to create, communicate, and put into practice useful ideas about leadership.

Early life
Geoff Smart was born in LaGrange, in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. His father was an industrial psychologist and his mother a speech pathologist.

He graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Economics with Honors in 1994, where he is on the list of notable alumni. While an undergraduate student, he was President of the school’s AIESEC chapter, which is a part of the largest student-run organization in the world, whose mission is international awareness through its work-abroad program.

Smart was attracted to Claremont Graduate University, where Peter F. Drucker was a professor, and later became of mentor of Mr. Smart. Smart earned his Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Organizational Behavior in 1998.

During this time, Smart co-created the Topgrading approach to talent management with his father Brad Smart. In their landmark 1997 article “Topgrading the Organization” the Smarts use the word Topgrading for the first time in print, and define the concept as “the process of proactively seeking out and employing the most talented people available, while redeploying (internally or externally) those of lesser ability or performance.” Geoff Smart and Brad Smart co-owned the trademark for Topgrading until 2011 when the former sold exclusive rights to the trademark to the latter.

In 1998, Geoff Smart’s Ph.D. Dissertation, Management Assessment Methods in Venture Capital: Toward a Theory of Human Capital Valuation, won inclusion in Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research (published by Babson College) and Smart was invited to present the findings at a global entrepreneurship conference in Gent Belgium. This research highlighted the importance of applying rigorous methods to evaluating leadership talent, and formed the scientific basis for the leadership consulting company he founded, ghSMART & Company, Inc. Smart’s dissertation research was later praised in Atul Gawande’s bestseller The Checklist Manifesto, and in The Financial Times.

ghSMART & Company Inc.
ghSMART is a leadership firm for CEOs and investors. Its stated mission is to use its expertise in human behavior to help CEOs and investors build valuable companies.

The firm has been characterized as a leading firm, a pioneer in its field in two case studies published by Harvard Business School, was praised in the autobiography of Blackstone Group co-founder Peter G. Peterson, and was profiled in a book about the world’s top professional services firms. The firm was founded in 1995 by Geoff Smart while he was a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University.

Today, with 10 offices across the U.S., the 100% employee-owned firm specializes in management assessment for pre-hire decisions at the CEO and board levels, private equity and corporate M&A management due diligence, M&A integration, CEO succession, board effectiveness, organizational performance improvement, senior management team performance feedback, and executive learning and development to maximize career success, impact, and financial performance.

The firm’s database of thousands of leader biographies, called SmartAssessments, has been called “coveted” by The Wall Street Journal, and has been used by Professor Steven Kaplan of University of Chicago in numerous scholarly papers and presentations. And firm’s fact-based consulting methods have been praised as being comparatively more thorough and widely-accepted in boardroom-level leadership decisions when compared to alternative firms and methods for evaluating leaders.

Who
Who: The A Method for Hiring (Random House/Ballantine Books 2008), co-authored by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, is a globally-acclaimed book on the topic of hiring leaders. The book describes a 4-step process for hiring called The A Method for Hiring. The four steps include Scorecard, Source, Select, and Sell.

Other core concepts include the Skill-Will Bull’s-Eye (when a candidate’s talents and interests match the requirements for a job), Push-Pull (whether a candidate was asked to leave a job or left voluntarily), 3 Ps (asking candidates for their performance relative to previous year performance, peers, and plan).

Awards:
 * The New York Times bestseller[1], The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller
 * Ranked “#1 Best Business Book for 2009” by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper
 * The Wall Street Journal book review of Who commented on the importance of the topic of hiring leaders: “Hiring is the most important aspect of business and yet remains woefully misunderstood.”
 * “Smart and Street clearly know their field.” Management legend Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, reviewed the book and proclaimed “I’m hooked” and later quoted from Who in Peters’ book The Little Big Things.
 * Shanghai Daily Newspaper acclaimed Mandarin version of Who a “top 5 business book” for 2009 in China.
 * Included on a list of “The 20 Best Business Books of All Time”
 * In 2011, The Wall Street Journal featured Who in its article “The Best Advice Around” as one of the 7 best advice books for leaders.

Leadocracy
Leadocracy (Greenleaf Book Group 2012) is a book that encourages private sector leaders to consider working in government leadership. Leadocracy means “government by society’s greatest leaders.” Smart did not start the movement of private sector leaders into government, but claims to have coined the term.

The idea for the book came while Smart was volunteering as leadership advisor to Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado. Three United States governors, social entrepreneurs including Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach for America), and over 30 CEOs have endorsed Leadocracy prior to its forthcoming publication July 3, 2012. Bloomberg Businessweek suggested that the concept of leadocracy may have merit and may be “the best solution” to the problem of underperforming government.

Social Entrepreneur
Geoff Smart is Founding Chairman of two not-for-profit organizations.

SMARTKids Leadership Program, Inc. is a 501c3 not-for-profit foundation that was founded in 2010. It provides a customized program of 10 years of leadership mentoring and a $100,000 scholarship to top students with leadership potential from low-income communities.

The Leaders Initiative, Inc. (501c3 pending) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to elevate humanity by identifying, developing, and deploying society's greatest leaders into government. The founding chapter, established in 2011, is located in Denver, CO, and provides Colorado leaders with education about cabinet-level leadership positions in the State of Colorado.

Smart and his ghSMART colleagues also provide pro bono leadership advisory services to leaders in the fields of education, healthcare, and government.