This is a particularly good time for women in the industry, she said. The coming together of the different skill sets actually works very well for women, who are now “on an equal footing” with men in the industry.

Ms. Luck said she started out her own career with a strong financial background and moved into the broker environment before joining XL in 1999. There she is responsible for group strategic planning, business planning, global human resources, global information technology, global marketing, internal audit, and the integration of acquisitions and startups.

One of the best things about her job at XL, she said, is that “it doesnt seem to matter where I go in the organization, I meet bright, capable people with fabulous educational backgrounds and varied experience.”

Ms. Luck began her insurance career in 1983 with Marsh & McLennan, and in 1992 was selected to head Marsh's global brokering operations in Bermuda.

She joined ACE Bermuda in 1997 as senior vice president of financial lines, where she was responsible for all alternative risk operations. She later was made executive vice president of joint ventures and strategic alliances.

Maddy Lichtman, president of APIW and senior vice president with Marsh in New York, said Ms. Luck was a natural for the award.

“APIW is dedicated to the advancement of professional insurance women and to the recognition of their contribution to the industry,” she said. “Our expectation is that the Woman of the Year fits those criteria.”

Fitting the criteria means strong leadership, strong mentoring, and “recognizing and helping other women advance and make substantial contributions to our industry and their own community.” Ms. Luck, she said, “absolutely represents every one of those criteria. In fact, she's an icon in our industry.”

She commented that “the fact that a womangets to be executive vice president at XL” in such a short period of time, and that she has worked at ACE and was one of the first managing directors at Marsh, “says it all.”

In a further discussion about the insurance industry, Ms. Luck noted that the industrys focus on technical capabilities can lead to neglect of leadership and management skills. At XL, she said, this has been a focus of hers for the past 18 months.

The company is instituting leadership and senior management programs “so that people are well-rounded executives and well-rounded managers,” she said. “Leadership skills are not always intuitive,” but require training and experience.

She recently completed her third leadership forum designed for senior management-level employeessomething that is becoming a regular event at XL.

The forums are important because of the number of acquisitions the company has been through, she said. Last fall the company started an initiative to bring its acquired companies together to “set the cultural tone from the top” in order to reflect the company's core values throughout the organization.

Bringing people together, many who are new to the company, to meet with coworkers and understand the different parts of the organization can be “powerful,” she said.

Ms. Luck said she has lived in Bermuda for 20 years and that “timing and the decision to move to Bermuda has been a big part” of her success. Bermuda, she said, “has been an incubator for ideas in our industry.”

And what is her advice to peers? “Something my mother taught me, which Nike has only just found out'Just do it,'” she said.

“I'm a big believer in not having an overdeveloped sense of self, but just having confidence in what you know you're good at, finding a way to make use of that, putting your energy in the right place and just going and doing it.”

In addition to her position at XL in Bermuda, Ms. Luck is a trustee of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, a Bermuda government appointee to the National Drug Commission and a trustee of the Masterworks Foundation, a registered Bermuda charity.

She obtained a bachelor of Arts degree in economics and finance from Manchester University in England and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, June 23, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.