Peter Meola

After over 25 years as a senior executive of multinational businesses, Peter is a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School in New York.  His primary areas of focus and passion are Leadership of Organizational Culture, as well as, Strategic Learning as a Leadership Process, which is uniquely applied within Columbia’s executive education programs, both open enrollment and custom.  Peter also teaches MBA candidates his popular elective, “Organizational Culture Demystified:  Leading and Creating a Winning Organization”.    

Prior to joining the faculty, Peter held a variety of senior executive roles in several global firms, including Unilever (Foods), Lehn and Fink (Household Products), The Seagram Company (Distilled Spirits), Tropicana (Beverages), Burmah Castrol (Lubricants) and ExxonMobil (Energy).  Prior to joining Columbia’s faculty, Peter was a Group Executive at BP PLC (British Petroleum), and CEO of their Americas Lubricant Division, where he led a cross-cultural and cross-functional employee base with operations in over 20 countries. In 2000, when BP PLC successfully acquired and integrated Burmah Castrol, Peter was an executive member of the Global Integration Team and the lead executive in the Americas. He was also an Executive Committee Member of the Global Lubricants business and Chair of their Human Resource Committee.          

Peter has a BA in Economics from Union College (Schenectady, New York) and an MBA from the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia). He is an elected member of Beta Gamma Sigma, a national scholastic honor society in the field of business and has attended post-graduate educational programs at the Wharton School, INSEAD and Stanford University.

He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of St John’s Riverside Hospital (Assistant Secretary and Chair of the Strategic Development Committee), Visiting Lecturer at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, Industry Advisor for  Primary Insight & AlphaSights and Founder of Meola Associates LLC, a strategic and organizational development advising and consulting firm.  Peter has served as a consultant for a number of firms, including Welch’s, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Henry Schein, CNA Insurance, IntraLinks, Chubb Insurance, UGI, Riverside Healthcare System, United Nations Federal Credit Union and many more.