Contact Information

+44 (0)20 7936 6116
email

Duke Corporate Education
165 Fleet Street
London EC4A 2DY
UK

Liz talks about the use and abuse of the partnership concept

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Download a PDF of Liz' co-authored paper on Managerial Transitions

Elizabeth (Liz) Mellon

Executive Director

Liz joined DukeCE in 2001 as Academic Director and became an Executive Director in 2004.  In these roles, she has designed and taught on programs for, among others, The New York Times, HSBC, Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deutsche Bank, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Credit Suisse First Boston, Rio Tinto, Unilever, Standard Bank and Schering AG.  As well as teaching, designing and acting as Relationship Manager for key clients, Liz facilitates senior teams, up to and including board level.  She travels extensively and works on six of the seven continents (not Antarctica yet), while being most closely associated with Duke CE’s London office.

Previous Experience

Liz started her career in the public sector, as a fast track graduate entrant into the government, because the idea of service was important to her.  She spent twelve years in the Department of Trade and Industry, where she covered a range of policy activities, from inward investment to trade.  Her most treasured assignments were running the office of a Minister of State under a Labour Government, acting as UK Government negotiator, in French, on an Organization for European Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Party and representing the Department on a Cabinet Working Committee. 

A desire to learn more about business led Liz to become co-Partner in a small business development consultancy and to her prize winning MBA degree at London Business School.  After graduating, she took a joint position as Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Public Sector Management and Senior Lecturer at the Civil Service College.  During this period, her research focused on finding best practices that could be transferred from the private to the not-for-profit sector.  This work was captured in her Phd on Leaders’ Values and the book “Managing Public Services”.  After transferring to the Department of Organizational Behavior at LBS, Liz continued to teach and advise public sector organizations.  She taught 100 Foreign Office Ambassadors and High Commissioners over a three year period, consulted with a variety of government departments including the NHS, worked extensively on leadership development with the Department of Health and constructed online leadership development programs for Head Teachers.  She was also special advisor to a Cabinet Committee on Scientific Research.

In her role as professor of Organizational Behavior at LBS, Liz taught credit courses in leadership on both the MBA and Executive MBA programs as well as teaching on a wide range of open enrollment and custom-design executive education programs. From 1998 to 2001, she served as Director of the Senior Executive Program, the London Business School's flagship program for senior executives. During the same period, she also taught on, and directed, the School's Global Consortium Program, a tailored development initiative across three continents for senior managers from six global companies: British Telecom, LG, Lufthansa, Oracle, Standard Chartered Bank and SKF.

Current Interests

In addition to a multiplicity of company client work, Liz is currently studying how to improve public sector leadership and to ensure a pipeline of talent dedicated to the not-for-profit sector.  She is co-Chair of a Duke CE Committee charged with setting out Duke’s Charter for Social Education.  This involves wider liaison across the Duke community, as well as coordinating with Duke CE’s efforts in social entrepreneurship in India and South Africa.

Educational Background

Ph.D. London Business School
MBA London Business School
BA, Languages, Politics and Economics