Janine de Nysschen
Janine de Nysschen is a South African strategy consultant, turnaround business leader, and writer whose career spans three continents and more than three decades. She began her professional life in South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s, working within intelligence structures during the country’s transition to democracy under President Nelson Mandela, an experience that shaped her understanding of institutional change, high-stakes decision-making, and the human factors that determine whether organizations survive transformation or collapse under it.
In 2000, she moved to the United States to join Microsoft as a global content strategist. An eighteen-month collaboration with leadership author Simon Sinek, beginning in 2007, sparked a shift toward full-time consulting. She developed what she calls a GPS for CEOs approach: serving as a confidential strategic advisor to senior leaders facing decisions too complex or sensitive to bring to their boards, investors, or teams. Over two decades, she has worked with CEOs, investors, and boards across complex, high-stakes environments, specializing in de-risking operations and optimizing processes in low-resource markets. In 2011, she returned to Africa to focus on healthcare, education, and technology projects, and has continued working across both continents since.
Alongside her consulting work, de Nysschen helps African and underrepresented voices turn lived experience into publishable books on entrepreneurship, migration, and gender. Her co-authored memoir A West African Entrepreneur’s Challenging Path to Financial Freedom: For Future and Family, written with Nigerian entrepreneur Ike Onyema Obi and published by Lived Places Publishing in 2024, was shortlisted for the BCA African Business Book of the Year 2025.
