A former FTSE 100 general counsel and McKinsey senior partner who now serves as a confidential strategic sounding board to fewer than 40 principals at any time — retained not for answers they can find elsewhere, but for the questions that change the trajectory of a chairmanship.
For eighteen years, Sigrid Verbert sat inside the FTSE 100. As general counsel of a London-listed insurer, she did not advise on the periphery of boardroom decisions — she drafted the papers, sat the night before the meeting with the chief executive, and watched the chairman's hand move across the page before anyone else did.
In that role she personally led two contested takeover defenses and one successful hostile-rejection strategy. The work is unglamorous in the telling and unforgiving in execution: late nights on the Takeover Code, weekday dawns with the financial adviser, Sunday phone calls with the registrar, and a quiet discipline of writing nothing down that was not also defensible to a regulator. It is the kind of training that does not translate into a curriculum — it can only be acquired in the room, under the lights, with the consequence arriving on a Monday morning.
By the time she departed the in-house role in 2011, she had spent the better part of two decades being asked the question most boards avoid: are we sure? That question — phrased exactly, without sentiment, repeated until it could no longer be evaded — became the instrument she would later carry into her own practice.
She left not because the work had dried up but because the room had become too small. The questions she was being paid to ask inside a single company were, she had come to understand, the same questions that chairs and chief executives across the FTSE, the DAX, and Euronext were quietly not asking of themselves.
The cap is not a brand. It is a discipline. Thirty-eight concurrent principals — the same number since 2014 — because the work cannot be done at thirty-nine, and the only honest answer to a chair who asks for more is to say no.
— Sigrid Verbert, in conversation with a sitting CEO, 2019Footnote Sixty-four per cent of current principals are based in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Benelux. The remaining third spans nine further jurisdictions across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.
Before the in-house role and after her early training, Sigrid spent nine years as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, working principally with chief executives and chairs in financial services, industrials, and the public sector. She led engagements across the United Kingdom, the German-speaking world, and the Nordics, and became known inside the firm for the engagements the firm itself was not certain it wanted to take — restructurings, hostile situations, and chairman-level diagnostics in the weeks before a chief executive transition.
It was at McKinsey that she first began to notice that the most consequential questions raised in a chief executive's office were not the questions on the engagement letter. The real questions arrived after the partners had left the building, often in a phone call the next morning, often from a chair who simply wanted to think out loud with someone who had been in the room.
In 2011 she founded Sigrid Verbert Advisory SRL, headquartered in Brussels with a registered office in London. The practice was deliberately small from day one: a team of seven — three senior advisors, two research associates, and two in client services — and a personal cap on principal engagements that has not moved since 2014.
She is an alumna of INSEAD's Advanced Management Program and holds an Honorary Fellowship of the Chartered Governance Institute. She has served as a guest lecturer at London Business School, INSEAD, and IMD, where her seminars on CEO advisory have become a recurring fixture of the executive MBA calendars.
Briefed fourteen sitting cabinet ministers and three central bank governors as part of confidential policy roundtables convened in Brussels, London, and Singapore. The discussions — on financial-stability perimeter, on succession in regulated industries, on the governance of state-influenced entities — are off the record by design.
Has sat on six boards as a non-executive director, two of them currently — one listed company, one registered charity. She has chaired nominations and remuneration committees, and served on audit committees through a period of regulatory tightening.
Guest lecturer at London Business School, INSEAD, and IMD on the subject of CEO advisory. Her seminar, The Question the Board Will Not Ask, is taught annually to executive MBAs preparing for their first chair-level appointment.
Forty-seven bylines since 2015 across the Financial Times, Handelsblatt, and Les Echos. Her 2019 Harvard Business Review piece, The Quiet CEO Problem, remains the most-cited practitioner article on board dynamics from that year. The discipline of writing for a principal's morning reading is the same discipline applied to the practice itself: short, exact, and unadorned.
The diagnostic engagement is a paid 90-minute conversation — €4,500 — and is the first step toward a six-to-eighteen-month retainer. References from existing principals account for seventy-one per cent of new engagements; the remainder come through quiet referral from chairmen, non-executive directors, and senior partners at law firms and consultancies. There is no obligation, and no follow-up correspondence will be initiated by the practice beyond a single courtesy note.
