Michelle Bazargan has a unique and diverse leadership background spanning startups and complex enterprise organizations across numerous industries and sectors including Technology, Wellness, Automotive, Finance and more. She inspires a new way of business thinking to balance putting people first, challenge outdated rules and systems, create resilient and sustainable business models and legacies. Her experience spans executing business innovation, product and marketing strategies in both startups and enterprises by placing focus on the one commonality everyone has – Our customers, employees and partners are all diverse humans. When people feel equal and included, they are empowered to contribute to driving change, creativity and innovation and impact business results and revenue.

Her baseline of struggle and possibilities is different, as she escaped a revolutionary war and came to the U.S. with $500 and unable to speak a word of English. The experience built a foundation of resiliency, reinvention and purpose to help others face fears, adversity and believe in their strengths. Passion fueled her to create a technology business from the ground up with a successful exit.

She is obsessed with inspiring people to keep it real and believe in themselves and speaks at events like TEDx on The Value of Human Connections. What lights her up is contributing to Children’s Shark Tanks Innovation programs, running innovation bootcamps for schools and universities, advocating for diversity and STEM and sharing perspective on Forbes Council, Huff Post, Podcasts and other platforms. She is also an athlete and believes the commitment and discipline to taking care of your health first is foundational to everyone’s success in leadership and life.

Episode transcription:

M: Hi everyone. My name is Michelle Bazargan. I'm excited to be here to kick off 2021. I am currently at Gartner helping clients prepare for the future, think about the future. Be more innovative. Think about the workforce strategy. I also have a company called Align Innovations and I'm very passionate about diversity and inclusion, the actionable way. So I do a lot of speaking engagements consulting around that and also help a lot of startups as well. Also brings that in Michelle.

J: Thanks for joining us. So the podcast to kick off the 2021 on the right note is very exciting to host you and talk a little bit more about all things, diversity inclusion, the law, the workforce innovation and a lot of that great stuff, very prevalent and relevant topics to especially in the current times. Tell us a little bit more about your backgrounds, where you come from your career path, and then I'd love to spend a couple of minutes talking about your current project, for sure.

M: Yes. so I actually have a really diverse and different background and I try to keep it front and center because it keeps me humble. And my family does it if I don't. So, I'm a very proud Iranian and American, my family and I actually immigrated here from Tehran, Iran. We, as a little girl, escaped a war, crazy in the middle of a winter storm, we were on a bus. We got smuggled out of the country, machine guns pointed to our faces. So, but the game of survival and being resilient became very clear to me as a child, and just like many other immigrants from a lot of different countries that have all come here to the US we didn't speak English very well. We had very little money. It was the point where we would put food back in the grocery line. We also were severely judged because of our names, our accents. And people lose sight that we're all from somewhere, right? No one, everyone is an immigrant. If you do an ancestor.com DNA test, you'll see that you are from somewhere. So people lose sight of that. As a child, I've found people went heavily into the media and believed what the media set there was a Iranian in us hostage crisis. And so we had to actually change our identity as Iranians,