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G. Richard Smith, M.D., shares his advice for success at UAMS. Image by Bryan Clifton

G. Richard Smith, M.D., Shares Four Decades’ Worth of Advice in his Last Lecture

Nov. 14, 2025 | G. Richard Smith, M.D., better known simply as Rick Smith, shared pearls of wisdom gathered during more than four decades of leadership at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) with a packed auditorium as he presented the third annual Last Lecture on Oct. 30.

Smith, a distinguished professor and former chair of the UAMS Department of Psychiatry who founded the Psychiatric Research Institute in 2006, was chosen by the UAMS Emeritus Society to deliver this year’s lecture, which was sponsored by the Jeanne K. Heard Endowment for Faculty Development and held in the Walton Auditorium at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.

The Arkansas native earned his medical degree from UAMS in 1977. After completing his residency in psychiatry at UAMS, he completed a fellowship in psychiatry and internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, before returning to UAMS as a member of the faculty in 1981.

 

Smith chaired the UAMS Department of Psychiatry from 2001 to 2013, then served as dean of the UAMS College of Medicine and UAMS executive vice chancellor from 2013-2015. He returned to the Department of Psychiatry and the institute in 2015, again serving as chair and director until his retirement in 2021. After the unexpected death of College of Medicine Dean Susan Smyth, M.D., Ph.D., at the end of 2022, Smith agreed to come out of retirement to serve as interim dean from 2023-2024.

Long active in research, Smith was also founding director of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement and a leader in securing the state’s tobacco settlement funds to improve health for Arkansans.

“He has kind of done it all,” C. Lowry Barnes, M.D., UAMS’ interim chancellor and chair of the UAMS Department of Orthopaedic Surgery & Rehabilitation, told the crowd in introducing him.

Smith’s lecture focused on advice for young or new faculty members on how to succeed in academic medicine at UAMS, even though he acknowledged that many in the audience were UAMS veterans.

“I see many familiar faces, some of whom I’ve known longer than any of us ever expected or thought possible when we met in our 20s, most in freshmen medical classes,” he said.

He began by attributing much of his wisdom to “something somebody else has said before,” crediting Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, Stephen Covey’s book First Things First, the Old Farmer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor’s radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” and “some not-so-well-educated but very clever country folks.”

Smith also shared a time management and decision-making tool that former President Dwight D. Eisenhower used to divide tasks into quadrants based on their urgency and importance.

As displayed on a large screen at the front of the auditorium, the quadrants are 1) urgent and important, 2) important but not urgent, 3) urgent but not important and 4) not urgent and not important.

“The goal of this, and the goal for young faculty and middle-aged faculty and old-age faculty like me is to expand Quadrant Two,” he said, referring to the quadrant that includes tasks such as preparation, revision, values, clarification, planning and relationships, especially with family.

“You want everything else to shrink and Quadrant Two to expand,” said Smith, who recently celebrated his 54th wedding anniversary. “You’ve got to put the family in there someplace, and otherwise you’re not going to be very successful in your career and experience true recreation, where you’re renewed and rejuvenated, and you continue to learn and grow.”

“You want to keep the urgent, non-important stuff down,” Smith said. “That doesn’t mean don’t do it — just do life differently, so you’re not so pressed and spending all your time there.”

He said that academic medicine “at UAMS and everywhere, frankly, is a team sport, but I’m afraid we give lip service to that and not really mean it. We say it a lot. We don’t do it much.”

Smith surmised that physicians have a hard time with the concept because “we were selected to get into our profession by our individual achievements, not by team achievements,” but said it’s important to remember that “very few big things at UAMS in the last 50 years have been accomplished by a single person.” As examples, he cited the expansion of orthopaedics and UAMS’ ability to obtain millions of tobacco settlement dollars to construct new buildings and expand Medicaid services.

Along those lines, he said, “My advice to everybody is to always give credit to your team. Your teams are important, and our real team is often the executive assistant, the nurses, the research assistants, the business administrators. They’re the ones who make the difference between realizing success and being close but not getting the prize.”

“Leadership is key to one’s success and can’t be overestimated,” Smith said. “It is imperative that if you’re going to be a success in academic medicine, you need leadership skills.”

To that end, he said his recipe for success is to be “mission-congruent with the organization, bring glory to the institution rather than yourself, and pay for yourself.”

New faculty members need to understand that “you need that tug and that pull to the institution to be able to help you and to help others get it done,” he said, adding that there is truth in the aphorism, “A rising tide floats all boats.”

“An important organizational survival skill is to never surprise the boss,” Smith advised. “We can tolerate a few good surprises, but we really hate bad news. Never surprise the boss with bad news.”

However, he added, “Always let your boss know if you think bad news may be coming. Partly this is so your boss can let her boss know that it’s coming, and they can be prepared for it.”

Other tips that Smith shared included:
 “Never waste a good crisis. Always try to make the crisis into something better for your team or for the institution.”
 Have a comprehensive long-term plan so you’ll know what to do and especially what not to do.
 Be careful of shiny baubles that lead you away from your plan — or make a new plan.
 Underpromise and overdeliver. But be sure to promise enough to get the grant.
 Remember, it’s not about you.