Lindsey Schmidt
Most organizations are running on judgment built for a world that no longer exists.
Strategic advisor to CEOs and boards on governance and organizational design.
The Moment
The gap between how organizations are built and what this era demands was already widening. AI is the accelerant, compressing timelines, exposing what was fragile, and making it impossible to defer the questions organizations have been quietly avoiding.
Governance is not the guardrail for this moment. It is the foundation. Get it right, and what becomes possible (more human, more creative, more genuinely innovative organizations) is worth the work.
The Work
I work with CEOs, boards, and senior leadership teams at moments of genuine inflection, when momentum slows, familiar playbooks stop working, and decisions carry consequences that weren't in the model. The questions tend to be consequential ones: how the organization is governed, how it's structured, what leadership the next era actually requires, and, increasingly, what AI changes about all three.
My role is to help leaders see what's operating beneath the stated problem: the assumptions that are failing, the structures that are misaligned, the judgment gaps no one has named out loud. Then I work alongside them to redesign what needs redesigning (governance, structure, operating model) rather than defend what worked before.
Strategic advisory and board roles
Governance and board oversight, including AI
Organizational diagnostics and operating model design
Advisory relationships with senior executives navigating high-stakes decisions
Speeches, provocations, and workshops for boards and leadership teams
Background
Two decades as President, CEO, and Global Managing Director, most recently President and CEO of WPP North America, alongside work with venture-backed and early-stage companies. Eight years of nonprofit board governance. Chief AI Officer certification, University of Chicago Booth.
That work shaped how I see: across the whole system, holding near-term pressure against long-term direction, and saying the thing that needs to be said in a way people can actually hear.
American Express · Coca-Cola · JPMorgan Chase · Amazon · Microsoft · P&G · Pfizer · Chevron · Northrop Grumman