Larry Smith Credit: Larry Smith Laurence (“Larry”) Smith is a long-time advocate of quality and systems-thinking-based management of U.S. businesses. In the early 1980s, while he was leading a chamber of commerce in northeastern Massachusetts, Smith recognized “the need for a transformation of American management,” he told me recently. A learning experience that inspired him to appreciate a holistic, systems view of business leadership and management was a four-day workshop his chamber sponsored in his community by the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming. “I learned to think of quality as a 360-degree process that includes quality of life,” Smith recalled recently.