Mary Landry is an independent corporate director serving on the boards of the United Services Automobile Association, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., and the nonprofit SCORE. In 2011, Landry retired from the United States Coast Guard at the rank of rear admiral. From 2013 to 2014, she served at the White House as special assistant to the president and senior director for resilience policy. She recently attended Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education's Compensation Committees: New Challenges, New Solutions program. Here, she shares her takeaways from the program.
HBS Executive Education's Compensation Committees program offered great content, case studies, and dialogue regarding best practices and lessons learned in compensation practices. This was an excellent course for board members in general, in particular for those serving on compensation and workforce committees.
I was especially impressed with HBS's ability to present a broad array of compensation topics over the course of the program. Time was well spent covering executive compensation, peer-group selection, and how to link performance measurement, incentives, and compensation to the overall corporate strategy. The best part of the program was the practice of merging lecture and review of case studies with participant engagement. This enriched the discussion well beyond the cases themselves. Additionally, there was a very nice mix of backgrounds and experience among the participants.
The review of what works and what doesn't work for the companies featured in the cases, as well as the "why" behind their failures, was extremely insightful. One company in particular—the subject of one of the case studies—was available during the program for Q&A. The frank background discussion that developed was an excellent learning opportunity.
Overall, I would highly recommend this course to corporate board members, company CEOs, and HR executives.