Melissa Quinn 
Partner,
Performance Coaching Inc.

Melissa Quinn has spent 20 years in a variety of roles including leadership coach, strategy and innovation advisor, head of training and development for a global company, and COO of Doblin – Deloitte Consulting’s design and innovation practice. Through these roles, she has both observed and directly experienced the challenges of innovation leadership. Today, she combines this experience with interactive workshops, training and coaching to offer inspiring and practical leadership experiences.

Early in her career as a strategy consultant, Melissa recognized that great strategies do not succeed or fail based on the quality of ideas, but based on leaders' abilities to execute those ideas. She has spent 20 years studying and fostering effective leadership. Since 2007, Melissa has focused specifically in the domain of innovation and transformation, where effective leadership requires very different mindsets, expertise and behaviors.

Today Melissa works with leaders through coaching, training and experiential workshops to help them transform themselves and their organizations in contexts of disruption, innovation and change. She draws not only from her experience as a consultant, but also from her own experience leading change and innovation. Melissa spent 8 years serving as the COO of Doblin, the innovation practice of Deloitte Consulting. She led the firm through two acquisitions, and built a design-led innovation culture and capabilities inside larger corporate parents.

Prior to Deloitte, Melissa was a Partner at Monitor Group, a global strategy consulting firm that helped clients pursue growth. She worked across a variety of industries and client challenges, and led a number of internal change initiatives and global talent functions for the firm.

Elspeth Murray 
Associate Professor & Associate Dean of MBA and Masters Programs
Smith School of Business

Elspeth Murray has served as the Associate Dean - MBA and Masters Programs since 2012, and has been a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business since 1996. She also holds the CIBC Fellowship in Entrepreneurship, and founded Queen's Centre for Business Venturing. Prior to joining Queen's, she worked in industry for 7 years for several firms including IBM, and Canadian Tire. As an integral part of her work in the strategy and new venture fields, Dr. Murray specializes in the management of change. In 2002, she co-authored a best-selling book, Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days, Oxford University Press, with Dr. Peter Richardson. She has recently co-developed (with Dr. David Saunders) the Analytics Climate Assessment Tool (ACAT), which is used to assess organizations technological capacity, skill sets, and analytics culture. Current research is focused on best practices in leading and managing change to create an analytics culture.

Dr. Murray teaches on many Smith MBA and Executive Education programs, and consults widely with a diversity of firms including BMW, Detour Gold, Wawanesa Insurance, Versacold Logistics and the Auditor General for Canada. She serves as a Director for several firms and is an advisor to several start-ups and CEO's. Dr. Murray received an undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics, and an MBA, both from Queen's University. Her doctorate in Strategy and Management Information Systems was completed at the Richard Ivey School of Business.