Hans-Christoph Hirt
Hans-Christoph Hirt is Adjunct Professor of Strategic Governance and Investor Stewardship at IMD, specializing in strategic governance and the role of investors in shaping long-term value creation. He brings over 20 years of global experience advising and engaging boards, senior executives, and institutional investors, drawing on his experience as a corporate lawyer, activist shareholder, and senior asset management executive.
Hirt’s teaching and consulting support organizations in aligning governance with their strategic priorities under diverse ownership structures and across different phases of organizational life cycles. He works with organizations in their specific context to strengthen board composition and effectiveness, improve board engagement with executives, and optimize interactions between boards and investors to drive sustainable performance.
Hirt’s expertise spans both the people-related and structural dimensions of governance, including board evaluation and development, CEO and chair succession, executive compensation, board structures and committees, information architecture, and shareholder rights, as well as institutional investment, investor stewardship, and sustainable investing.
A central focus of his work is the relationship between boards and investors – whether institutional, state, founder, or family investors – across both public and private markets. Having engaged with hundreds of companies across Asia, Europe, and North America as a senior investor representative at Federated Hermes and UBS, he supports leaders in navigating these relationships constructively and with lasting impact.
At IMD, Hirt teaches across several open and custom programs, including High Performance Boards. His unique blend of academic rigor with deep practitioner insights offers senior leaders practical frameworks and tools to address real-world boardroom challenges.
Hirt has published widely in leading academic and practitioner journals. He co-edited the 2023 book Investment Management, Stewardship and Sustainability, contributes regularly to board and investor forums, and is the author of a comparative study on the enforcement of directors’ duties in Germany and the UK.
In addition to his IMD role, Hirt maintains a broad portfolio of board and advisory roles across the investment chain from pension funds to investee companies, with a focus on investment and corporate governance.
He is an accredited professional trustee with Pi Partnership; a trustee and non-executive director of the Hermes Group Pension Scheme; a member of the Investment Advisory Committee at impact-focused asset manager WHEB; a member of the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Listing Authority Advisory Panel; an advisory partner at Fidelio Partners, where he leads board evaluations and development programs; and a senior consultant at Arkadiko, where he advises institutional investors on sustainable investing and stewardship strategies.
Hirt also teaches at Bayes Business School and at the University of Göttingen, and he has a long-standing affiliation with University College London’s Law Faculty, where he serves on the Advisory Board. He has lived and worked in Asia and co-led international investor-chair initiatives on board-shareholder dialogue and executive compensation.
Over the last two decades, he has held a number of senior leadership roles in global asset management, including Managing Director in Sustainable Investing at UBS Asset Management, where he led stewardship in impact strategies. He was also Managing Director of EOS at Federated Hermes, where he oversaw its expansion to over $1.6tn in assets under advice, and was also a board member.
Earlier in his career, Hirt practiced corporate law at Ashurst and held academic posts at the London School of Economics, where he earned a PhD in corporate governance. He also holds degrees in business administration (Germany and the UK) as well as master’s degrees in international law (University of Glasgow) and climate change management (University of Edinburgh).