"I was twelve when I started reading the business section."
Lynell Renee Green
Why I do this work.
I grew up in Hawaii.
It's the kind of detail people put on bios because it sounds nice, but for me it shaped everything that came after. Hawaii taught me — long before I had language for it — that culture, acceptance, and human connection across difference aren't soft skills. They're the foundation of any group of people trying to do something together.
I was twelve when I started reading the Honolulu Advertiser business section cover to cover. My mother noticed. Before long she'd subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fortune, and I read them all. That was the beginning — not of an interest in business, but of a fascination with leaders. How some navigated agility and ambiguity with grace, while others, with the same credentials and the same resources, drifted.
I never stopped studying them.
Alongside my own career in Big 4 accounting, startup IPOs, and global tax strategy, I spent more than a decade leading the Self-Expression and Leadership Course at Landmark Worldwide. The room held Fortune 100 CEOs and emerging leaders sitting next to each other, working on the same questions. I also trained the coaches who supported each course. Coaching the participants taught me how to meet a leader exactly where they were. Coaching the coaches taught me how to teach that distinction — what it actually means to help someone find the next level of their own leadership.
That's where the instincts behind the Framework came from.
The C-SUITE Mindset™ Framework is the result of all of it — the Hawaii foundation, the lifelong study of leaders, the boardroom credentials, and the decade of coaching across every level of leadership in the same room. It's the framework I wished existed for the emerging leaders and the seasoned executives I now work with — leaders running teams across time zones, cultures, and continents.
It's robust enough for both. That's the whole point.
What I've come to believe.
Two decades of studying leaders and leadership: over 10,000 hours on stage speaking and leading leadership development trainings, plus thousands more hours coaching. Together, they've made a few things non-negotiable for me.
I believe most leadership failures aren't dramatic. They're drift. The slow, almost invisible loss of strategic intent that takes capable people somewhere they never chose. The book I'm writing is named for it.
I believe culture is built by leaders who think before they decide. Six pillars: Clarity, Courage, Curiosity, Culture, Consistency, and the Choice that activates all of them, are how I teach that thinking.
I believe in strategy over scripts. I'm not a coach who runs the same method regardless of the room. What a leader needs, what a team needs, and what an organization needs are three different diagnoses, and three different interventions. I build the strategy to fit the need, not the need to fit my process.
I believe the best work happens at the intersection of strategic rigor and human honesty. My CPA training taught me the first. Hawaii, and two decades on stages and in coaching rooms, taught me the second. Neither one is enough alone.
I believe leadership is global now, or it isn't leadership. The team you're leading today is distributed across time zones, cultures, and continents. The frameworks built for the team down the hall don't work anymore. Mine was built for the team across the world.
The work behind the work.
A partial record of the practice.
- TEDx speaker · "The CEO Mindset is for Everyone"
- Virtual Speakers Hall of Fame inductee
- President, NSA Northern California chapter
- 10,000+ hours on stage speaking and leading leadership development trainings
- Executive Coach for over 2 decades
- Thousands of hours coaching tech executives
- Clients including Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, Hilton
- Decade-plus leading Landmark's Self-Expression and Leadership Course
- Harvard Certificate of Specialization in Strategy
- MBA, Keller Graduate School
- BBA in Accounting, University of Hawaii
- Retired CPA and Enrolled Agent
- Goldman Sachs "10,000 Small Businesses" initiative, in partnership with Warren Buffett
- Author of Drift: Why Smart Leaders End Up Somewhere They Never Intended to Go (forthcoming)
- Co-author of Grit and Tenacity: Transforming Leadership in Business and Community, curated by Cathy Derkson
- Contributing author, Manage Self, Lead Others, curated by Nina Sunday
Short, medium, and full bios are available for program books, introductions, and press use.
View Speaker Kit →Drift: Why Smart Leaders End Up Somewhere They Never Intended to Go.
Drift names the silent pattern Lynell has observed across thousands of hours of coaching tech executives, the small, daily concessions that, compounded, take capable leaders to places they never chose. The book gives the phenomenon language. The framework gives leaders the tools to reverse it.
Is your leadership team drifting or driving?
Bring the C-SUITE Mindset™ Framework to your next leadership event or corporate training.
