Sharon Ditchburn
Senior External Associate at GCC Board Directors InstituteSharon Ditchburn has 30 years’ experience in the fields of accounting, law, corporate governance, risk and compliance. Sharon is a Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia, Chartered Governance Institute, and CPA Australia, and is a member of the IFAC Professional Accountants in Business Advisory Group and the CPA Australia ESG Centre of Excellence. She is also a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, holds an MBA specialising in Corporate Governance and Entrepreneurship, and was a co-founder of the ICSA Gulf Forum in 2005.
In 2004 she formed one of the first Compliance and Corporate Governance specialist firms in the Middle East. She has been an Authorised Individual with over 30 regulated financial services companies in the functions of Compliance, Anti Money Laundering and Finance. Sharon is certified to deliver Corporate Governance specialist courses, including the Director Development Program by the International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group), and presents regularly for Institutes of Corporate Governance, Directors and professional organisations across the GCC, Africa and Asia. As well as the Financial Services Industry, her experience covers the mining, information technology, engineering and professional services sectors, and includes related areas such as enterprise risk, technical due diligence, investor relations, and fast growth industry strategies and controls.
Hans-Martin Stockmeier
Senior External Associate at GCC Board Directors InstituteDr Hans-Martin Stockmeier is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Dubai office. For more than 25 years, Hans-Martin has served clients in the financial-services sector—retail and commercial banks, wealth-management providers, securities exchanges, and financial regulators—on a wide range of topics. Hans-Martin moved to the Middle East in 2003 and speaks German, English, French and Spanish.
Dr Hans-Martin is an expert on corporate governance, strategy, organisation, and operations and has wide experience in working on projects together with GCC BDI across all sectors. Prior to joining McKinsey, Hans-Martin worked at Deutsche Bank in commercial banking, as well as for the investment banking division of Union Bank of Switzerland in Frankfurt.
Dr Hans-Martin holds under graduate degrees in economics from the University of Witten/Herdecke (Diploma) in Germany and Carleton University in Canada. He completed his academic education with a Masters degree in Finance from the London School of Economics and a doctorate degree in financial economics from Humboldt University in Berlin.
Markus Wiesner
Senior External Associate at GCC Board Directors InstituteMarkus is Regional Managing Partner of Heidrick Consulting for Asia Pacific, Middle East & Emerging Markets, based between Dubai and Singapore. As a member of the global consulting leadership team, he is responsible for developing and implementing the go-to market strategy and operating model for the firm’s fastest growing markets.
Markus is a trusted Advisor to senior executives and boards on strategic organizational and HR matters, with a proven ability to link strategy to the people agenda and create bottom-line business results. With over 20 years’ experience in consulting, his technical expertise spans across organizational design and change, leadership assessment and development, large scale HR transformations, culture shaping and top team effectiveness. Markus has completed projects in over 30 countries with major global and regional organizations.
Markus is an ICF accredited Coach, and a Chartered Director (IoD London). More recently, his personal consulting work has been focused on helping boards and senior teams on refining their leadership style and collaboration.
Before joining Heidrick & Struggles, Markus was the CEO for Middle East and Africa at Aon Hewitt. Prior to this, he spent a decade at Mercer, where he was the Managing Director for their Middle East business, after managing their Austrian operations.
Markus earned a PhD in economics and social sciences and an MBA from the University of Vienna where he was teaching organizational design and decision making in the MBA program for many years. He also has a masters in sport management from IE University in Madrid. He attended executive programs at the Harvard Business School and the Institute of Directors in London.