Lynn Sharp Paine

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Biographical Information

John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration / Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Harvard Business School.

Lynn Sharp Paine is John G. McLean Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Harvard Business School. A member and former chair of the General Management unit, she co-founded the School's required course on Leadership and Corporate Accountability and currently co-chairs the Senior Executive Program for China. Ms. Paine's research focuses on the leadership and governance of companies that meld high ethical standards with outstanding financial results. Her publications, including more than 200 case studies, have appeared in a variety of books, periodicals, and scholarly journals. She is most recently co-author of Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business with HBS colleagues Joe Bower and Dutch Leonard.

Her other books include Value Shift: Why Companies Must Merge Social and Financial Imperatives to Achieve Superior Performance (McGraw‐Hill 2003) and Leadership, Ethics, and Organizational Integrity (McGraw-Hill 1998). Her most recent articles include “A Global Leader’s Guide to Managing Business Conduct” (with Rohit Deshpandé and Joshua Margolis), “Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are You Doing About It?” (with Joe Bower and Dutch Leonard), and “The China Rules: A Practical Guide for CEOs Managing Multinational Corporations in the People’s Republic”—all published in the Harvard Business Review.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College, Ms. Paine holds a doctorate in moral philosophy from Oxford University and a law degree from the Harvard Law School. She is a member of the Massachusetts bar and practiced law with the Boston firm of Hill & Barlow early in her career. In addition to providing executive education and consulting services to numerous firms and industry groups, she has served on a variety of advisory boards and panels. She was a member of the Conference Board’s Blue‐Ribbon Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise after Enron’s collapse and the Conference Board's Task Force on Executive Compensation after the financial crisis of 2008. Ms. Paine is currently a member of the academic council of the Hills Program on Governance at CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) and one of three public members of the Governing Board of the Center for Audit Quality based in Washington, D.C. She was a director of RiskMetrics Group (NYSE) until June 2010, when it became part of MSCI Inc., and currently serves on the board of Atos SE (NYSE Euronext Paris).

Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1990, Ms. Paine taught at Georgetown University Business School and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business as well as National Cheng Chi University in Taiwan, where she was a Luce Scholar in 1976-77. Since 1987 she has been a permanent member of the Henry Luce Foundation's Luce Scholar Selection Panel. She and her husband, Tom Paine, have three adult children and live in Wellesley, Massachusetts. [1]

Affiliations

• Director, Atos
• Governing Board (Public Member), Center for Audit Quality, Washington, D.C.
• Academic Advisory Council, Hills Program on Governance – Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.
• Selection Panel, Luce Scholars Program, Henry Luce Foundation, NYC

Positions held during the last five years

• Advisory Board, Conference Board Governance Center, NYC (2009-2011)
• Director, RiskMetrics Group (merged with MSCI June 2010) (2008-2010) and member of the Compensation and Human Resources Committee
• Member, Conference Board Task Force on Executive Compensation NYC (2009)