About Jeannette Neyses

FOUNDER + CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Jeannette Neyses is a leading industry expert in strategy-based planning and advisory support to CEOs, agency heads, family office directors, and other organizational leaders across complex challenges central to growth, innovation, performance improvement, and value creation.  As an impassioned change agent, she specializes in business, technology, security, and emergency management imperatives and driving organizational transformations that improve companies' profitability, market share, and reputation. 

Comfortable handling people's instinctive resistance to change, Jeannette motivates others by collaboratively creating shared visions and introducing them to ideas and challenges that speak to their hearts and minds.  She has an innate capacity to deal simultaneously with many situations, managing immediate priorities without losing sight of long-term goals.  She is also adept at igniting partnership across the disciplines, mechanics, and complexity inherent in creating projects, teams, networks, strategic alliances, and entirely new programs built “from the ground up.” 

Several years ago, Jeannette founded The Baghera Group to share with other leaders the successes and lessons she has gleaned over her 20+ year career in mission-critical, high-performance geopolitical and geoeconomic environments worldwide – such as U.S. and foreign capitals; crisis hotspots and warzones; and boardrooms, C-suites, and command centers, from D.C. to Davos and Dubai.

As an extension of its “guardian” mission, ethic, and culture – which emphasize stewardship, prevention, and humanity – the firm conducts strategic, multi-disciplinary organizational assessments at the enterprise, operational, and departmental levels and translates its findings into highly actionable program development initiatives.

Before launching her consulting firm, Jeannette served as Deputy Chief Security Officer (CSO) for the National Basketball Association.  She designed, developed, and managed dozens of security initiatives supporting the league’s priorities, business operations, and technology implementations while improving productivity, quality, and efficiency of integrated departmental operations across the NBA’s entire organizational footprint, including WNBA, G League, NBA2K, Basketball Africa League, and USA Basketball.  She also implemented the league’s crisis management and emergency preparedness program for properties and events and established new security initiatives and custom technology platforms that improved operational integrity.  In 2019, she received the first Commissioner’s Innovation Award for designing and implementing several customized technology-based applications.

Jeannette began her career as a U.S. Special Agent in the U.S. Secret Service.  In addition to conducting global criminal and intelligence investigations, she led computer forensics initiatives in multi-jurisdictional cases and served as an instructor and liaison to international law enforcement officials.  She also worked in an overseas diplomatic attaché role advancing the effectiveness of highly sensitive security issues across 50+ countries throughout Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.  Jeannette served in leadership roles on the elite Presidential Protective Divisions for President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush and led the Electronic Crimes Special Agent Program (ECSAP), investigating and overseeing all telecommunications, financial, and cyber fraud cases.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Texas State University, a master’s degree from American Military University, and an MBA from Marist College. She also holds certificates from Harvard University and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in executive leadership and cybersecurity.