As the founding principal of JMS & Company, John Michael Schert provides systems change consulting and leadership development for clients around the world. He is a futurist, speaking on humanity’s evolution in an uncertain, volatile world. Schert began his career as a ballet dancer with American Ballet Theatre and Alonzo King LINES Ballet after attending high school at the University of North
Carolina School of the Arts. In 2004, he co-founded Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), concurrently serving as the company’s executive director and a dancer for nine years. During this time, he gained a unique insight into the process and product of art making and realized the ability to translate the creative process across different disciplines and domains. He served as the inaugural visiting artist and social entrepreneur at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and as an associate fellow with the New York University Center for Ballet and the Arts. Through these appointments he studied, and lectured on, the utility of the creative process and how the skills and behaviors of creatives can be of relevance and value to other sectors.
Schert is a recipient of a 2019 USA Eisenhower Fellowship, traveling to Thailand and Egypt to study authoritarian systems. He holds a Master of Public Administration, with a Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences Certificate, from the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.