Elizabeth Lank is an independent specialist who works with private and public sector organisations to help them improve efficiency and effectiveness through greater cross-boundary collaboration and knowledge sharing. She has a particular interest in helping leaders harness knowledge and information as business assets, following nearly five years of practical implementation experience as programme director of a CEO-sponsored knowledge management initiative across a large multi-national (Fujitsu/ICL).
Examples of typical leadership challenges she has helped to address include:
How do we eliminate the organisational ‘silos’ that often lead to expensive reinvention of the wheel?
How do we get better at sharing good practices without coming up against the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome?
How can we build effective partnerships across organisational boundaries to achieve specific outcomes – within our own organisation but also with other external stakeholders?
How can we ‘know what we know’ and put that knowledge to work to achieve our goals?
Recent clients include AstraZeneca, the global pharmaceutical firm; Compass, the multinational food services group; IdeA, the Improvement and Development Agency for U.K. local government; the Inland Revenue, the U.K. tax authority; the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE); and Tesco, the leading retailer.
After completing the INSEAD MBA degree in 1986, Elizabeth joined I.T. services company ICL and held a number of strategic organisational development, management development and internal communication roles (including leading ICL’s Mobilising Knowledge programme) before opting for a ‘portfolio career’ in January 2001. She spent the early part of her career working for the European headquarters of an American computer company in Geneva, Switzerland. A Canadian by birth, she graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1980.
Elizabeth is co-author of the book The Power of Learning - A Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage (IPD 1994), written as a practitioner’s guide to building ‘learning organisations’. She has published a number of articles on knowledge management and collaborated with Amin Rajan on the research report ‘Good Practices in Knowledge Creation and Exchange’ (CREATE 1998). She is a member of the international editorial boards of the Journal of Change Management, the Journal of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Review.
Elizabeth is an expert evaluator for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Information Society. She has been a visiting lecturer on the Cabinet Office’s Top Management Programme, at INSEAD, London Business School and Henley Management College, as well as a regular speaker at public and in-company management conferences.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
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Impressions of the 2nd Gurteen Knowledge Conference 26 November 2003 by Shane Godbolt 
, Tim Dee 
Collaborative Advantage (2005) by Elizabeth Lank
Elizabeth Lank Knowledge Consultant
