Smart is an operator who built his firm on his own doctoral research, not a consultant who bolted a framework onto a practice afterward. He earned a B.A. in economics with honors from Northwestern, then an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Claremont Graduate University [1]. His 1998 dissertation evaluated hiring methods against roughly fifty years of prior research and found that “past-oriented interviews,” built on a candidate’s actual track record, were the most valid predictor of future job performance, a finding good enough to present at the Frontiers of Entrepreneurship research conference in Brussels [2]. He founded ghSMART that same era, in 1995; a 2023 Forbes profile found him still its founder and chairman, the firm then at roughly 170 people and more than $100 million in revenue, one of the best consulting firms most people have never heard of [3].
The research kept running after the dissertation. Who: The A Method for Hiring, written with Randy Street, draws on “exclusive interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 60 CEOs, investors, and other thought leaders,” plus a separate University of Chicago study of the success habits of over 300 CEOs [4]. The outcome-driven Scorecard method it introduces is what Management Craft’s The MOC descends from. Who became a New York Times bestseller [5]. Smart and Street, with Alan Foster, followed it with Power Score, a Wall Street Journal bestseller [5]; Smart’s Leadocracy, arguing for more private-sector leaders to serve in government, also hit the Times list and won a Silver Medal in leadership at the 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards [6].
His word carries the most weight on exactly one thing: hiring, evaluated as an empirical problem rather than a matter of gut feel: who to hire, how to interview them, and how to hold the resulting decision accountable. He is devoted to management in the narrowest, most useful sense: one methodology, tested against roughly fifty years of prior research [2], rather than a general theory of the firm. That focus is the throughline: from a psychology dissertation on interview validity [2], through a consultancy built entirely on it [3], to the book that turned it into a teachable method other people could run without him in the room [4].