Next50: The first millennials are joining the ranks!
Peter Bommel, ranked no. 1 in the Next50, is the rising star of the Dutch supervisory board this year. Born in 1961, he might not be considered ‘young,’ but he is certainly young at heart; see also the box ‘International governance expertise’ down below. As former CEO of Deloitte Netherlands, Bommel is certainly no stranger to the Dutch corporate world. He is not a new face in the Next50 either. He has been steadily climbing the ranks for some time: last year he was ranked no. 8, and the year before, no. 17. Bommel previously chaired the supervisory board of APG. On January 1 of this year, he added a prestigious new supervisory board position at flower auction house Royal FloraHolland. Since January 1, he has also been a member of the brand-new supervisory board of the highest sports authority in the Netherlands: NOC*NSF. Bommel was already a board member there, but the national sports umbrella organization has opted for a more modern form of governance – with a supervisory board and, of course, with Peter Bommel.
Peter Bommel: international governance expertise
Peter Bommel (born in 1961), former CEO of Deloitte and ranked no. 1 in this year's Next50, likes to emulate his father, theologian Jan Pieter Bommel. ‘My father started studying theology at fifty-eight and has written more than thirty theological books,’ he said a few years ago in an interview with the website of the VU Vereniging (Free University Association), the club Peter Bommel chaired until last year. In the interview, Bommel also announced that he had no plans to retire: ‘I do not intend to stop working before I am seventy. I still have a lot of energy and am active in all kinds of forums.’
That seventieth birthday is still miles away. And Bommel proves once again that he still has plenty of energy. On January 1st of this year, he added another forum. Bommel joined the supervisory board of Royal FloraHolland, the international flower and plant cooperative. He also became chair of the audit committee.
Supervisory board chair Evert van Helvoort expressed his delight in Bommel's arrival: ‘His broad background in various sectors, combined with his international management expertise in strategy, finance, and innovation, make him a valuable addition to our supervisory board.’ That is no exaggeration. Peter Bommel is one of the most recognizable names in the Dutch consulting and accountancy world. He was at the helm of Deloitte Netherlands for many years and has since developed into a broadly involved director in various sectors. Bommel studied accountancy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He also completed a US Certified Public Accountant program at the University of Delaware. After graduating, he began his career in the financial world with positions at Philips, KBB, and MetaCorp, among others.
Bommel believes in ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’; he is athletic and fit, and practices meditation and yoga. ‘I see it as gymnastics; it gives me energy, and stretching my muscles makes me less stiff,’ he once told the FD (Het Financieele Dagblad). It is no coincidence that he still holds a position at the coordinating Dutch sports organisation NOC*NSF. Since January, he has been a member of the brand-new supervisory board (he previously served on the board of directors). He enjoys sailing, hockey (the Naarden veterans' team), and chess. At the age of twelve, he finished second in the Haarlem School Chess Championships. Bommel – whose favorite opening is the King's Indian – personally invited former world champion Garry Kasparov to give a lecture at Deloitte's headquarters –including, of course, a game of ‘simultaneous.’ Bommel: ‘Chess has many aspects that Deloitte recognizes itself in. Elements such as strategic thinking, thorough preparation, perseverance, and decisiveness are essential for success as a Deloitte employee and as a chess player.’
In the 2015 ‘Dream Weekend’ column of the FD, Bommel confessed that his dream weekend always has to start in Aruba (more specifically: Renaissance Island, just off the coast of Aruba). ‘I have a close connection with this part of our kingdom; I worked on Aruba for about eight years, and three of our four children were born there.’ His fictional dream weekend would take him to Curaçao, Silicon Valley (for a lecture by Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University), the Wadden Sea, Café Rooie Nelis in the Jordaan neighborhood (‘We came here every week during my student days and were literally part of the furniture’), Tokyo, Stellenbosch, and Barcelona—or more specifically, Camp Nou football stadium, where he would end his dream weekend with an FC Barcelona match.
Bommel succeeds Sandra Berendsen, who topped our list last year and is now among the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members. At no. 2 in this year's ranking, we also find the highest-ranking newcomer and highest-ranking woman: supervisor Daniëlle Melis (see ‘Dreaming and Raising Your Hand’ down below). She was appointed to a new position on the supervisory board at PGGM. She is also currently busy monitoring and, where necessary, revising the corporate governance code as a member of the current Corporate Governance Code Monitoring Committee. A perfect fit for this governance specialist.
Daniëlle Melis: Dreaming and Raising Your Hand
She considers the late Professor Steven Schuit of Nyenrode Business University her most important mentor. ‘On the day of my appointment to the Monitoring Committee,’ Daniëlle Melis (born 1972) said in an interview with this magazine last year, ‘I sent him a message to thank him for his wise governance lessons.’ The story has a somewhat sad ending: ‘I later heard that he had passed away that evening.’
The appointment to the Corporate Governance Code Monitoring Committee was an honorable highlight in Melis's career: ‘It is an honor to work through this committee to further update the standards for good governance that were first described in the Tabaksblat Code more than twenty years ago and to generate support for these principles within companies,’ she said in the same interview.
Melis is considered one of the most prominent corporate governance experts in the Netherlands. Among other things, she was chair of the Nyenrode Corporate Governance Institute. And she still lectures on the subject within the Nyenrode Supervisory Board Cycle. She also obtained her doctorate on the topic of the institutional investor stewardship myth, a study of the role of institutional investors in governance.
A formative moment for Melis, she told the Nyenrode Business University website, was a 2013 visit to the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) in New York. ‘There, I listened to a compelling presentation by Samantha Nutt of War Child Canada about abuses in the mining sector and its impact on local communities in Africa. Hundreds of institutional investors with financial interests in that industry were in the same room. (...) It was a moment when I realized how relevant a better understanding of stewardship by institutional investors is and will continue to be.’ In recent years, Melis has been developing as a professional supervisory board member. And this has not gone unnoticed, given her excellent ranking, rising from ‘nowhere’ to no. 2 in our Next50 – her new and current high point on this list.
Her appointment last year to the supervisory board of the cooperative pension administration organization PGGM underscores her reputation as one of the most talented supervisory professionals in the Netherlands. In addition to her position at PGGM, she is a member of the supervisory board of Achmea Investment Management and Achmea Real Estate, among others. Her motto: ‘A good supervisory board member always has time for a good conversation.’
And if the rules did not prevent her, she would prefer to do even more, as she admitted to Management Scope: ‘As a professional supervisory board member, I find it unfortunate that I have to limit myself to an absolute number of five. The result of this limitation is that qualified supervisory board members go abroad or take on advisory roles, while there is still a great need for experienced supervisory board members in the Netherlands. I hope that the limitation rules will be further nuanced for professional supervisory board members.’
Where will it ‘end’ for Melis? Presumably with a ranking in next year's Top 100 Supervisory Board Members. Last year, she expressed her ambitions openly in Management Scope—as part of the ‘speak your dreams and raise your hand’ initiative: ‘I still aspire to a supervisory board position at a Dutch listed company, whether or not within the financial sector, innovative, in the Netherlands or internationally, with a complex stakeholder landscape.’
The top three is completed by Dirk Anbeek, supervisory board member of Sligro (where he is chairman), Roompot/Landal, and Ajax, among others. Last year, the former chairman of Landal holiday parks just missed out on the podium (no. 4). We add up the points fairly, but Anbeek actually deserves a number of bonus points in this ranking, simply because he is ‘the last man standing’ on the most talked-about supervisory board in the Netherlands – that of Ajax. All other supervisory board members have resigned, been dismissed, dropped out, or been bullied out over the past year. That being a supervisory board member at Ajax is slightly different from any other supervisory role was once again evident from the emotional appeal Anbeek made during the most recent general shareholders meeting, as reported by the Ajax Showtime website: ‘The inaccurate information I read about Ajax is appalling. It is absurd that someone is accused of delivering a ‘shot in the neck’ (De Telegraaf reported that supervisory board advisor Louis van Gaal delivered the ‘neck shot ’ regarding the dismissal of coach John Heitinga, ed.) while someone else is portrayed as a ‘tumor’ (supervisory board member and former Ajax player Danny Blind was called this by agent Rob Jansen, ed.). It defies all decency. I urge everyone to address each other with decency. Focus more on the content and less on the person.’ We hope for Anbeek's sake that things will be a little more pleasant on the Sligro supervisory board.
Sky-high ambitions
The top 10 includes two promising newcomers who will bring Dutch companies much joy in the coming years: Simone Huis in 't Veld (no. 9) and Isabel Moll-Kranenburg (no. 10). Huis in 't Veld, former CEO of EuroNext Amsterdam, has embarked on a second career as a professional supervisory board member with great ambition after taking a sabbatical. In this edition (see ‘Reset, reflect, restart’), she says: ‘A ninth position in the Next50 is a great honor. I am very happy with that. But I will be honest: I want to be on that other list: the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members.’ Given that Huis in 't Veld says she still has room in her supervisory agenda, we do not rule out that she will succeed in the foreseeable future. The knowledge of tech expert Isabel Moll-Kranenburg (see ‘A resilience agent as a supervisor’ down below) will also be valuable to many companies and organizations. Moll-Kranenburg is still very active as an executive – she is CEO Benelux of Dell Technologies – but this year she took on a new non-executive role on the supervisory board of Menzis. She was already a supervisor at Odido Netherlands, where she undoubtedly has her hands full with the massive data breach that came to light in mid-February.
Isabel Moll-Kranenburg: a resilience agent as a supervisor
Isabel Moll-Kranenburg (born 1973) came into contact with technology at an early age. Her father, a teacher by profession, created educational applications for students struggling with math. ‘One day he asked me if I could test the program he had created before he took it to school,’ she told the website Dutch Women in Tech. ‘A few weeks later, I went to his school and saw the impact he was making.’ He taught each child to multiply, but the most impactful thing I saw was the growing self-esteem of those children and their newborn interest in learning more and working harder to become even better.’ She concludes: ‘From that moment on, the passion was born.’ Speaking of passion: according to her own LinkedIn profile, Moll-Kranenburg is ‘driven by one goal: to create a tangible and lasting impact with my passion and skills.’
Moll-Kranenburg is one of the rising stars of the Dutch supervisory world. And that is still doing her a disservice, because Moll-Kranenburg is not only active as a supervisor, but also primarily on the ‘other side’ of the boardroom table, namely in an executive role as CEO Benelux of IT infrastructure and hardware company Dell Technologies. Her resume now exudes ‘tech,’ ‘digital,’ ‘innovation,’ and ‘change management.’ ‘From day one of my working life, I had the opportunity to add value in exciting IT assignments and roles, develop different areas of expertise, and discover new opportunities every day,’ she said.
She was once one of the first women in a senior technical position at Microsoft in the Netherlands, heading up cloud and business applications. In an interview with NRC, she said it was not always easy: ‘Let me put it this way: I am blonde, I looked young for my age. That is why I always had to work harder than men to prove myself.’ She still believes in ‘female power.’ She told the website Dutch women in tech: ‘Without generalizing, but I think women are naturally more inclined to join forces and work from a place of connection, rather than immediately seeing others as competitors.’
In the early years of her career, she worked at KLM, where she held various IT roles. After her time at Microsoft, she moved to KPMG, where, as a partner in the data & analytics unit, she led digital transformation projects for clients in healthcare and government. In January of this year, she joined the supervisory board of Menzis. Since 2024, she has also served on the supervisory board of Odido Netherland. This earned her a No. 10 ranking in the 2026 Next50.
Moll-Kranenburg has emphasized in several public appearances and interviews that technology only truly gains value when people understand and apply it. Technology should not be an end in itself, but a means to achieve real social and business impact. In her keynote address for the Dell Technologies Forum 2025, she further explained her vision: ‘There is one thing, one important thing, and that thing is us. That is humanity. That is us as leaders. Because it is not only about technology. It is about the people who use the data, who make courageous decisions every day, and who always stay in step to realize that progress, innovate faster, and drive this new innovation.’ During the same keynote, Moll-Kranenburg advocated for the resilience agent—leaders who not only manage change but also help organizations find stability while they adapt to ongoing technological evolution. Exactly what many supervisory boards desperately need.
Listen and ask questions
The rest of the top 10 consists of more or less familiar names. Medy van der Laan (from no. 9 in 2025 to no. 8 this year), Tim van der Hagen (from no. 6 to no. 7), Fleur Rieter (from no. 7 to no. 6), and Diederik Samsom (from no. 10 to no. 5) in particular already know what it is like to be ranked in the top 10 Next50 for a year. That feeling is new to Roelien Ritsema van Eck. She rockets into the top 10 from eighteenth place last year, a top spot at no. 4, largely thanks to her supervisory position at ABN AMRO Mortgage Group and her new role as chair of the housing corporation de Alliantie, although an executive board position naturally carries only minor weight in a supervisory board list.
Balance and newcomers
Those who have been paying close attention will have noticed that this year’s top 10 includes six women and four men. Last year, when we wondered whether there could be ‘a little more’ in terms of women in the overall ranking, there were still five to five. In 2023 and 2024, there were three women in the top 10. If we zoom out to the entire top 50, the gender balance is clearly tilted again: twenty-three women and twenty-seven men. This makes the list slightly less unbalanced than last year, when it was twenty-two (female) to twenty-eight (male). In 2024 – and the year before – there were exactly as many men as women in the top 50 ... draw your own conclusions if you wish.
We take a closer look at the top three highest new entrants (Melis at no. 2, Huis in 't Veld at no. 9, and Moll-Kranenburg at no. 10). This year, the Next50 has a total of seventeen newcomers (ten men, seven women). That is the same number as last year, but considerably fewer than in 2024, when we welcomed thirty newcomers.
One of the promising newcomers, and also the second youngest on this list, is Alliander CEO Maarten Otto, born in 1983. He was appointed to the supervisory board of NWB Bank last year. Otto has a growing fan base, mainly because of his modern, transparent leadership style. Koen Overtoom, CEO of the Port of Amsterdam, recently expressed his enthusiasm for his counterpart in an interview with Management Scope: ‘I admire Maarten Otto, with whom I collaborate on our energy projects. He dares to be vulnerable. At one point, he said that he could no longer do his core business, supplying electricity, due to grid congestion. That is not something you easily admit as a CEO. (...) He opened up about it. If you say something like that, you get help.’ We are curious to see what this approach will bring in a supervisory role. Otto seems well aware that supervisory work is not something you can just do on the side. In ‘I now have more compassion for supervisory board members,’ in this edition, he says: ‘I understand better how difficult it is to distill the essence of our challenges from the entirety of our information provision without getting bogged down in the details.’
Risk specialist and water board chair of the Rivierenland Water Board, Tanja Cuppen, also storms this list from nowhere. She enters at no. 14. In 2023, she was already at no. 37, before briefly disappearing from the scene. Her return can partly be explained by her new position at Nationale Hypotheek Garantie (National Mortgage Guarantee), where she became a supervisor, in addition to her supervisory role at the Menzis cooperative. Cuppen has a long history as chief risk officer at ABN AMRO and Rabobank, among others. She also sees her supervisory work as a form of risk management. As she said a few years ago: ‘If you think about it, there is a nice parallel with risk management. There too, prevention is better than cure: preventing damage is generally more effective than detection and response.’
Eugène Willemsen, the man who brought Lipton to China
Anyone who follows Eugène Willemsen (born 1967) on social media gives you a glimpse into the life of a business executive at a major international corporation. One moment he is meeting with Prime Minister Modi of India, the next he is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and not much later he is standing at the guardrail at a Formula 1 Grand Prix—for example, in his home country at the Zandvoort circuit.
Willemsen is CEO of International Beverages at PepsiCo, the American food and beverage company known for several world-famous products on supermarket shelves: Pepsi, Lay's, Quaker, Doritos, and Gatorade. Willemsen oversees all beverage operations outside North America. His presence in the pits at numerous Formula 1 races is due to the fact that Gatorade is one of the sponsors of the Mercedes-AMG F1 Team (Max Verstappen's main rival...).
Judging by those same social media posts, Willemsen is not often in the Netherlands. But that may be about to change since mid-December, he has been a member of the supervisory board of FrieslandCampina, as the fourth external independent supervisory director. His new role has earned him a ranking in the Next50, at no. 33.
The new position at FrieslandCampina brings Willemsen back to where it all began. In the late 1980s, after studying business administration at Nyenrode Business University and economics at VU University Amsterdam, he started as a market unit manager at Campina—one of the precursors of ‘FC.’ After about five years, however, he left and moved to PepsiCo, the company where he has now been working for over thirty years. On his LinkedIn profile: ‘Thirty years at PepsiCo, and the journey continues, but I still wonder: where has the time gone? It feels like yesterday I started my first project, and yet I have had the privilege of witnessing the company's incredible growth, adaptability, and expansion on a global scale.’ Initially, Willemsen was responsible for the Benelux and Europe. According to insiders, Willemsen's ‘European perspective’ was a particular asset for the American company. Professor Henry Robben of Nyenrode Business University once commented in the AD newspaper: ‘Willemsen's knowledge of how to approach products in local markets is essential. Americans often think Europe is a single country, but he knows how the countries and their consumption of drinks and snacks vary.’ But soon, not just Europe, but the whole world became his stage. It is partly thanks to Willemsen that China started drinking Lipton iced tea.
An important step in Willemsen's career was his role as CEO of PepsiCo AMESA (Africa, Middle East, South Asia), where he led more than 26,000 employees in seventy-four countries from 2019 onwards. In this position, he was seen as a leader who pursued commercial performance while also fostering social impact in local communities. Under his leadership, programs were set up that focused on women empowerment, youth development, and social innovation through initiatives such as the Arab Youth Hackathon, She Works Wonders, and Amal Academy. He was also recognized with the CARE Impact Award for Corporate Vision for his commitment to PepsiCo's collaboration with the She Feeds the World program, which promotes gender equality in agriculture.
In an interview with The CEO Magazine, he stated that integrity is at the core of his leadership style and that he strives for a culture in which people feel empowered to take responsibility. In his public appearances, including at the World Economic Forum, Willemsen has established himself as an advocate for responsible innovation, sustainability, and digital transformation. Willemsen, the son of a ‘white and brown’ goods importer from Oosterbeek, initially wanted to become a heart surgeon, according to one of the rare profiles of him in the Dutch media published by the FD. But life clearly had something else in store for him.
Youngest foals in the stable
In this list of emerging supervisory board members, we are naturally also curious about the youngest foals in our stable and the greenest leaves on our tree. Well, those looking for GenZ will be disappointed (they are probably still too busy, we hear the older generation mutter cynically), but Management Scope is proud to announce the arrival of no fewer than three millennials on our list – at least if we interpret the definition of 'millennial' a little broadly, namely 'born between 1981 and 1996'. Former VVD politician Klaas Dijkhoff, born in 1981, just makes it into this category, as does the previously mentioned Maarten Otto (born in 1983). By far the youngest on our list, however, is agricultural entrepreneur Sandra Stuijk, born in 1995, who recently joined the supervisory board of Royal FrieslandCampina. 1995? That is approaching GenZ! The oldest on our list this year is former Labour Party politician Martin van Rijn – born in 1956. He is one of the three Next50 supervisory board members who is an obvious choice within the Netherlands' executive landscape, or perhaps it is something that simply happens to companies and organizations over the years. After all, there are not that many supervisory board members from the 1940s anymore …
The former politician as a subcategory
With the mention of Martin van Rijn, Klaas Dijkhoff, Medy van der Laan, and Diederik Samsom, we arrive at an interesting subcategory: that of former politicians. This also includes former PvdA (Labour Party) Member of Parliament Frank Heemskerk (no. 34), which brings us to ten percent of our list.
This proves once again that membership in Parliament is an excellent stepping stone to a supervisory career. At least for members of the well-known centrist parties; we were unable to find any supervisory board members with, for example, PVV or FVD backgrounds or sympathies, although we were not present in the voting booth with all fifty candidates.
A frequently used catchphrase
We already noted during the presentation of the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members that ranking people based on ‘color’ has become somewhat frowned upon. ‘Diversity is a broad concept’ is a frequently used catchphrase in these columns. Or: ‘It is mainly about diversity of thought.’ All well and good, and perfectly fine. ‘Do not shoot the messenger,’ we lightheartedly retort – but meanwhile, the top 50 is remarkably monochrome, namely fifty shades of white. Or rather, forty-eight. Fortunately, Artie Debidien (no. 30) and Abhijit Bhattacharya (no. 41) add some spice to the, on the surface, rather dull Dutch polder stew.
What is also striking is the relatively large number of directors in the Next50, by which we mean people who, in addition to a supervisory role, also fulfill a role on the other side of the table, for example on a board of directors. This applies to eighteen people on the list.
Progression
What about progression from this list to the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members? We can cautiously claim that a top position in this list is a guarantee for a position in the list of all lists. After all, the four most recent ‘winners’ are all included in the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members. Sandra Berendsen, last year's no. 1, is at no. 19 in the ‘big list,’ and the Next50 leader, Kuldip Singh, is at no. 16 in the Top 100. Baptiest Coopmans (2023 laureate) is at no. 78, and Roderick Munsters (the 2022 list leader) is at no. 25. At no. 49 of the Top 100 Supervisory Board Members of 2026 is Laetitia Griffith, who topped the Next50 in 2020. Seven people from last year's list have progressed to the Top 100, including last year’s top three.
Which brings us to the final conclusion: there is change. The panels are shifting. There is momentum. The new generations are coming forward. But fortunately, the older generations are not going to be pushed aside anytime soon.