Juliet Williams
Doctor of the University (HonDUniv)
Year conferred: 2005
Juliet Williams is characterised by the creativity and innovation she has brought to a varied and colourful career across the public and private sectors.
In 2002 Juliet became Chairman of the South West of England Regional Development Agency and during her 7 years with the Agency masterminded the development of the South West’s Regional Employment and Skills Partnership into a national exemplar; was the catalyst to the birth of VisitEngland through re-engineering the management and marketing of England’s tourism; played a major part in formulating the national Creative Economy Programme; was a member of the Boards of the Academy for Sustainable Communities and of VisitBritain , of the Government’s Industrial Development Advisory Board and of the Nations and Regions Group for London 2012.
Juliet is responsible for the creation of an EU network dedicated to ‘taking innovation to market more quickly’ and remains its ambassador, Commission spokesman and workshop convenor. RAPIDE attracted the support of 25 regions across 21 EU member states, old and new, is in the midst of a 2-year programme of work due to report in November 2010 and pays particular attention to the needs of Europe’s more geographically peripheral and remote regions.
In addition, Juliet was instrumental in securing the funds to pilot ‘Be the Best You Can Be’, the brainchild of Olympian Dr David Hemery, that has inspired teachers, pupils and parents in secondary schools serving the more deprived communities to find a purposeful and productive future and make a significant contribution to delivering Lord Coe’s promised legacy of London 2012. More recently, she has been working with 14 and 15 year-olds in the UK’s remote island communities to engage them into turning their interests and hobbies into commercial enterprise.
Juliet is currently engaged with two companies, Twofour in Plymouth and David Nieper in the East Midlands, as well as the relevant Higher Education Institutions, to nurture the young talent required to secure the futures of the digital technology and fashion industries respectively. She is Chairman of a number of companies, principally in the advertising and marketing services industries.
Juliet is a graduate of London and Cambridge Universities, a qualified teacher and spent her early career in publishing. She became editor of The Geographical Magazine before spending 17 years as chief executive of high growth companies in the creative industries where she grew ‘one of the 100 best companies to work for in the UK’. She is a specialist in the management of change in organisational behaviour, the matching of business culture to customer expectation, and has a considerable reputation for the ‘surgeries’ she conducts for organisations aspiring to high growth where management teams are schooled to become the architects of their own success. Juliet teaches the change management methodology, Workplace Marketing TM, the methodology she developed following her ‘100 Best’ success, to MBA students at universities in the UK and US. She is Visiting Professor at Northwestern University USA and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Oxford Brookes University.
Juliet was awarded the CBE in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for ‘services to the tourism and creative industries’ and is to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Gloucestershire in 2010.
Updated October 2010
