Faculty and Research

Lynn Sharp Paine is a John G. McLean Professor at the Harvard Business School, where she is a member and former chair of the General Management unit. She currently heads the Leadership and Corporate Accountability group and teaches in the Advanced Management Program.  From 2004 until June 2008, she served as course head for the required MBA course on Leadership and Corporate Accountability. Her teaching assignments have also included the required General Management course for MBAs, elective courses on ethics in the MBA and Executive Programs, and the second-year MBA elective on Managing Across Cultures.

Ms. Paine's research focuses on the leadership and governance of companies that meld high ethical standards with outstanding financial results. Her book Value Shift: Why Companies Must Merge Social and Financial Imperatives to Achieve Superior Performance (McGraw-Hill 2003) was named one of the year's Best Business Books by Library Journal and a top-10 business book by Soundview Executive Book Summaries.  (Japanese and Chinese versions were published in 2004). Ms. Paine's publications, including more than 200 case studies, have appeared in a variety of books, periodicals, and scholarly journals including the Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Wisconsin Law Review. Her text and casebook Leadership, Ethics, and Organizational Integrity, (Irwin 1997) has been translated into Japanese (2000) and Chinese (2001).

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. Her consulting activities have included advisory and executive education services for numerous companies, law firms, and industry groups.  In addition, Ms. Paine is a Faculty Associate of Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, a member of the academic advisory board of the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Reasearch at Wharton, and a member of the academic council of the Hills Program on Governance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.  In 2002-2003, she served on the Conference Board’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise and in 2009, on its Task Force on Executive Compensation. She is a public member of the Center for Audit Quality's Governing Board and a director of RiskMetrics Group.

Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1990, Ms. Paine taught at Georgetown University's 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 Luce Scholar Selection Panel. She and her husband, Tom Paine, have three adult children and live in Wellesley, Massachusetts.