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 She inspires a new way of business thinking to balance putting people first, challenge outdated rules and systems, create resilient and sustainable business models and legacies.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, because if we went anywhere, we were called terrorists and names and all kinds of other things it's actually the reason why a lot of Iranian Americans call themselves Persians because a lot of people weren't educated to know that Iran was actually of Persian descent. It went as far as me. I actually, a lot of people don't know this. My first name is actually mare Noosh Michelle Bazargan. And what happened is my family gave us American middle names. Because when we immigrated here, we knew that we would struggle. And so I had to actually flip my name around. So my name is actually Michelle Marunouchi Bazargan because we couldn't fit in. And I went to linguistics classes actually to get rid of my accent. That's the only reason I don't have an accent. And so I'm bringing all this up because we use this buzzword diversity equality. Inclusion and it's real. It's real for me. It's real for every immigrant that's been here. Every person that is of a different color, different gender, different race, different sexuality. And so we really need to get serious about going beyond the checkboxes of hiring more women, hiring more people of color, and really holding ourselves more accountable because it's real and it impacts people's real lives is what I've found for sure through my journey, of even how I became fell into tech is actually tied to the story, which is why I started off with it. So, what happened was my dad was very passionate about technology and so he actually studied computer engineering at university of Miami. We didn't have much money. So he would take me to his engineering classes. I was building computer systems with him, running networks, all kinds of things. And so from there that actually launched my tech career. He has entrepreneurship in my DNA. So we started a company I've been working at since I was probably 15 years old. Originally it started to make ends meet and then it turned into my career. And my passion from there, I've worked in major corporations from Toyota Distribution to Ultimate Software to Oracle. I also have spent a ton of time working with startups. I've worked with the Accelerator Founders Institute, Tremendous, Asleep. And I actually even developed and built and sold a fitness technology solution as well. So I've always gone kind of back and forth between the enterprise and innovation. And it's really neat because you start to very clearly see why startups are more innovative, why corporations and large companies lose that innovative spirit. And so at Gartner, I try to really guide clients like Nike, American Express, FedEx on how to really be able to do both because you need to be able to scale, which is what startups sometimes struggle with. But you also need to be innovative. Like if you don't innovate and you get hung up on the day to day, You won't be here long term. So I'm super passionate about that. I do that at Gardner and that Aligned Innovations. I'm a professional speaker and I also do a lot of consulting on diversity and inclusion and helping startups scale as well.

J: Well, that's exciting, quite a background. We really appreciate you sharing the personal story behind those can definitely relate to that on many levels. I mean, never hear myself, so that's congratulations to you of that great success you've been able to accomplish so far. I'm pretty sure there's just scratching the surface from that perspective. You've briefly mentioned a little bit around from an innovation standpoint, it's a passion of mine, a lot of guests that I host on Ivy Podcast, that's a prevalent topic. We talk a lot about innovation strategies to build and foster that culture of innovation. So to say, you also mentioned something around, curiosity, from, as that being, creativity being part of that innovation concept. Tell us a little bit more kind of your take on that. What are some of the strategies that really help you? When you partner with your clients or whether you're working at your current organization to not only kind of speak, talk about the overall concept of innovation, but something tangible as far as really fostering that culture of experimentation innovation standards.

M: Absolutely. And Jahn, as an immigrant, you'll appreciate that that curiosity is probably still, even in your DNA because a lot of innovation is driven from scarcity and there're so many examples of that. And so, when you look at the last financial downturn is where the Uber's and the Airbnb's and the group bombs came to life, mainly because they saw a need. They saw a scarcity, they saw people were struggling financially. And they saw and they thought through, well, how can we take advantage of this opportunity, right? They didn't sit there and cry that, there's a financial downturn. They said, awesome. This is an opportunity. What do we do? And so, they created Uber where people could share vehicles that was actually driven because of a financial limitation for people sharing homes, Airbnb, who would think that you would sleep at a stranger's house. So, scarcity is definitely a driver. Starting first, I think, there's this always, this chicken and the egg. Is it culture or is it leadership? Where does innovation start? And I would say the conversation usually starts with culture, but I actually would say that it starts with leadership. Mainly because I believe that both in personal life and in professional life and in business, everything starts with yourself. So I like to challenge clients and even my own personality and my personal life to really think about what is your purpose? Why do you do what you do? our jobs as leaders and we're all leaders, we're all either leaders at home on the soccer field. Whatever we do, we are all leaders to some capacity. And day to day from a corporate perspective, let's just say, or startups at scale. A leader's job. Isn't performance reviews. It's not quarterly business updates. It's not managing KPIs leadership, which is leadership for the future to drive both innovation curiosity and inspire people and the organization to go through places that they never thought was possible. And when you look at the grades, like the Steve Jobs of the world or the reasons, Elon Musk's of the world that Jeff Bezos’, that's what they do. it's table stakes to do performance reviews and meetings and PowerPoints and things like that. So really, I think first it starts with every leader or really every person. It doesn't even matter if you just graduated college. Like why do you do what you do? What drives you? And this principal actually. Be used for all areas of life. Like, why do you do what you do in your personal life, with your relationships? What is your vision and your goal? What do you need to really do to maintain a legacy? So, on a per on. Having these tough conversations with not only yourself or the people around you. I challenged both myself, everyone I'm around and every leader to really start thinking about what they can do differently to set the tone. You can't send conflicting messages, like please be innovative on Friday afternoons because that's how Google does it. As a leader, you need to understand that your company's culture is very different from Google. So that's not very empowering to kind of send that message. It's really to step back and say bottom up top down, how do we work together to really bring this to life? Are we giving you guys enough time? Are we just talking or are we being the walk? Are we asking you to be innovative? But then we're asking you to do the day to day and it's not working. Are we saying, please be innovative, but then please don't fail. Or are our behaviors showing failures, not Excel. So those are the real challenges. And then as a leadership team also sitting down and saying, what message as a team are we sending? So a lot of organizations are set up in silos, right? You have the chief information officer, the chief marketing officer, all these chiefs. But no, one's really coming together to say, as a leadership team, what do we do differently? First us and to help cause this ripple effect in our culture and silos are a big challenge. So a lot of people don't realize that our organizations and our organization charts were actually created back. And the industrial revolution where all we were trying to do is manage risk and perfect output. And so what's interesting is if you pull up one of those org charts from like the 19 hundreds, it actually looks the same, which is kind of scary. So we are, functioning the same systems, the same structures, the same silos that were set up to manage risk. They were never set up. To drive creativity or innovation. And so, and then top it off, we use a lot of buzz words. So it just really inhibits it. So we have to rethink the structure, one of our organizations we have to really challenge ourselves from a leadership perspective, we have to throw out everything that we know, because if you think about all the turmoil around us, all the change around us. What worked even two years ago, six months ago is not going to work now. So getting away from these I know statements, we know statements. And really empowering bottom-up top-down to do it better instead of saying, how do we become innovative? How do we die drive digital transformation? Like, what does that actually mean for you as an individual and you, and the organization itself?

J: Right. I love these examples and it definitely makes sense. And especially the overall concept of that kind of servant leadership where you take the org chart almost where you're talking about flipping that upside down and looking at it from that perspective that, hey, you know what. Things from a leadership perspective, really walking the walk that in a sense, we're not just saying innovation just for marketing and the PR standpoint, but it's really, and creating this autonomy amongst all of the employees or whatever the organization you're part of and really view innovation. Not so much from that overall innovation standpoint, but it's really an opportunity for us to improve whether that's digital transformation, people, transformation and whatever else the case may be. It's really empowering the employees to think outside the box and really figuring out ways to foster that creativity and innovation. So I love those examples. And setting the tone for that too. I think the tone is so important because if you get to your point, if you get a ton of inspired people in a room, but the leaders are talking for the first 20 minutes, for example, you're setting the tone. So everyone in that room is going to follow you. So I sometimes tell leaders like high levels, say which direction you're going, inspire people, leave, hire really amazing, smart, cheerful people. And your job becomes a lot easier, so great. Right. Absolutely. I love that. And the next question I have for you is something that you briefly touched upon from the overall diversity inclusion perspective, more specifically around female leadership or female executives and especially in technology, it's a very it's a highly requested topic on Ivy Podcast from our listeners and so forth. And I know. It's an extremely loaded question that I'm about to do that we can probably, we should probably spend like a series of podcasts, episodes, podcasts. Negate entire, vertical to this. And I know it's a challenge for you to summarize these concepts into one concise response, but still, what is your take on the vendor? If you were in your early stages of your career and knowing what now what recommendations can you provide when it comes to the work life balance, or career growth from the female leadership perspective? What are some of the things that really helped you along the way that you kind of wish that you knew earlier? So just wanted to get your take on that.

M: Yeah, no, that's a great question because really. The foundation that we lose sight of is people right? Females, males, everyone, anyone with really a heartbeat falls into this category. And before I dive into your question one of the important things to also kind of on the diversity front, remember we're obviously in turmoil, there's things going on around us. We're all having some sort of struggle, whether it's family struggle, something we're all connected through struggle. But we don't speak to each other like that we use a lot of buzz words. We don't speak human, we speak very robotically and that ripples into this topic because we have this armor around us or masks you could call it that we all kind of wear based on what's on the outside. And so, before I get into kind of the specific women of questions, cause I actually have a different, very different possibly controversial twist to that whole question. But all of us can do better. All of us can, from a human perspective, go beyond checking these boxes. We can, instead of society push us and all these messages push us too fix all of our strengths and folk fix your strengths. Go after your weaknesses do better. And we lose sight that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and we can all work together. Like, men, females, or people of different backgrounds, all have experiences that are unique, that are innate. If you grew up poor, for example, that makes you different. You're probably, a little bit more empathetic women by natural DNA, by God's given nature, which is why we can carry children and are a little bit more empathetic. That just is male. Have that masculine energy. I think we keep going one extreme to the next, instead of really just aligning and figuring out what we're good at and what we're not good at and complimenting it. You're never going to fix every single weakness that you have. And so we lose sight of the human piece and we're so focused on. What we look like and what genders we have and things like that. And so, for me, one is, first of all, I think we should all do better in this space. Myself included. I think that we really all need to focus more on diversity of thought. And not what skin deep, what the color of my skin is the color of my hair. I certainly have been picked on because I looked different. It was different, had an accent when I came here getting past some of those superficial things that we'll really focus on right now and going a little bit deeper specific career advice that I would give, for me, actually the twist here, the controversial twist is I've actually had more support from male colleagues in my career than I have women. And I've only always reflected on why is that? And one of the things is because over the years and that still exists today, there's limited seats at the table in general, there's limited seats at a manager's table directors, table, VP chiefs, whatever you want to mean. And so people become very competitive and the ego kicks in. And so for me, I've always struggled with this topic to be quite. I actually even declined recently women's events because I'd like to fix the challenge, like, what is the challenge? Are we having real conversations, environment and by all humans, like let's really have real deep conversations of why things are not working. Is the corporate structure outdated? What are the root causes? So that's one perspective, I guess, for the audience to keep in mind is I think the challenges we have keep going from one extreme to the next and just hiring people and putting people at a desk doesn't really solve the deeper problem because we are empowering them? Are we including them? If you're hiring a ton of women, okay. Are you giving her to him? For example, or if you're hiring a person of color for diversity and inclusion, are they really empowered to drive this? Or are we just doing a checkbox. So the top advice that I would give to segwaying into for all humans, I guess, because I mentor a lot of men in addition to women and people of all different kinds of races and colors, and I don't even see color and all those things. And I think the first one is you need to ask for what you want and whether it's a salary, a title, a promotion, a position. and if you get a no, no is not a never, Noah's a comeback leader. And I had to, as I had this naturally in my DNA, because as an immigrant struggling, like we have to do whatever it took. And the other big thing is don't ask for sponsors, don't ask for mentors, sit down and ask for someone let's say within or outside of your organization, that you really look up to. And ask them to sponsor. You ask them to get real, to help you navigate, to move through the organization. If you don't ask very rarely have I seen someone just come and tap you on the shoulder and promote you because of hard work, hard work is just a piece of it. And I think that's one of the biggest things people miss is. The world has changed and you're not necessarily going to be recognized for what you deliver all the time. The other big thing that I find is, and I think this is because of our human wiring of comfort. You have a choice, like you either have to have courage or you have to be in our comfort. You cannot have both, you can't stay in an organization for 15 years, like we used to back in the day and be comfortable and think your career is going to flourish. Those days changed both ways, both on the employee side and both on the employer side from an overall workforce strategy perspective, the entire workforce has been disrupted, It's not just about remote work and zoom. It's more than that. So careers are not linear anymore. You have to get, you have to constantly stop and reflect. Am I at the right table? Is my ladder that I'm envisioning, leaned even against the right building. Should I be switching buildings, even basic things like that, because time is so limited. And as we all, we're all bound by our calendars. If you don't have a plan and a vision for yourself, and you're not constantly measuring it. You're gonna turn your head and spend time and energy working somewhere, and it's not even aligned with where you want to go. So that's really crucial. What I mean by plan act and measure is you have to take control of your career. You're the CEO of your life. Really? you can't rely on a boss to get you the skills you need. You can't rely on a company to send you to the training you need. You need to step back and look at what I would like to accomplish for my career. And that's different for everyone. Not everyone has aspirations to become a senior leader in an organization. Some people want to become experts at what they're really good at, for example, in technology, maybe going up to an architect position or what have you, so really be conscious of where you want to go in five years, for example, and then work backwards to that. Like I literally, and I've done this for years. I have a spreadsheet with like six tabs and I have like a life plan for each area of my life. Finances and my skills, I'm big into athletics. I'm an athlete, my training plans. And every week I sit down and I check in and say, what am I doing? What worked well, what didn't work well, you have to have a strategy and then you have to have in corporate terms, a way that you're measuring yourself and you're being truthful with yourself. Otherwise relying on a company, a boss, a leader to manage your career is really risky. It's always been risky, but in today's day and age, where everything is changing and nobody knows what we're going to really land for the future. You have to be one the CEO of your life and to the CEO of your career, you can't rely on anyone to do that for you. Oh, I love these, and you did a really good job summarizing, such a loaded question. It's kind of these key concepts and recommendations really appreciate that. It's bottom line taking full control and really not relying on somebody else to dictate or be in charge of your career, your life and so forth and informing kind of these almost. Audits on yourself in terms of my performance, my ambitions, my career and what's the action plan to get there. I think it's super important yet often overlooked.

J: So those are great written. Definitely appreciate that to pivot a little bit, once you get your take on myself being extremely entrepreneurial and I always, all of the guests that I host on the show, we talk about the different trends. We talk about the different ideas. What's the next big thing? So for Michelle, what is that? What are you currently researching? What is the next big trend that you were observing that you think is going to be the most impactful?

M: For sure. That's a great question. So by trade, as I alluded to, in the beginning of, we started our talk by trade. I'm a technologist. I'm an engineer at heart. So by trade, I gravitate towards all of the technology, things that we all hear, right. Cloud AI and machine learning, predictive analytics, edge computing, internet of behaviors, right. The list goes on and on. Non-technical. Can be using data to do the right time, right place in marketing. But I have to step back over the last five years and go, what's the real foundational trends that are happening. Meaning let's say we perspect in machine learning and AI, which in certain roles I've had a lot of innovation roles that I've led, but a lot of them have failed. And so the common theme that I came to was, and I say technology, but this can apply to anything. It can apply to finance. It can apply marketing basically. I mean the technical discipline of your trade. So I came to that this is just a tool. And so the top layers that I'm looking at and finding that impact. Success and failure of one, not just startups, I'm sorry, not just large enterprise companies, but also startups comes back to the people piece. So, I think some people realize it, maybe some don't we're in the middle of a global workforce disruption upside down. and certainly, we're all really excited about what technology changes are going to mean to us, but we're always going to have people in the mix. The first one is skills and education are being turned upside down. The education system has not evolved. I gave the 19 hundreds board chart example. The education system is having the same challenge. I also speak to a lot of universities and schools. I work with them to create their innovation curriculum. And it's just not working, which is why you're seeing companies like Amazon Tesla schools, you name it. Creating their own little universities their own little bootcamps because they're seeing this gap. The other thing is there's a skill shortage as well happening across the board mainly because skills have become so commodity one great example that I'll reflect on from back in the day. Amazon became really proficient in the cloud space. And so we had a lot of systems engineers that didn't want to accept that systems engineering was becoming a commodity. And so that has happened and that's accelerating even more. So you can't rely any longer on just your technical trait that you went to school for, whether it's you learn finance or you learn marketing you really have to step back and look at some of the other soft skills you need as well. And that's where the shortages are with the soft skills people who are curious, insanely curious, question, everything, question, what they know extremely collaborative. Where they have, can't say no ego. We all have ego, have lower ego where they genuinely want to work with others. They're comfortable with failure. They have grit and you can find these types of people in wastes that you never thought. So, for example, I'm an athlete. I'm in a lot of athlete communities, athletes by nature are comfortable with failure. They have grit. They're super, just self-disciplined. So you don't always have to rely on one area of a person. So getting to know others, but mainly it's to understand that has changed. And that's where the shortage actually is coming into play, which is why you, for example, I'm sure people are experiencing this. You can hire the smartest person. Let's say an AI, but if they're missing curiosity, they're missing, they're not comfortable with failure. They're not disciplined. They don't have grit. They're oftentimes not successful. That's been my experience. So that's why there is such a gap. One, because our companies don't teach that our schools don't teach that. And so people are losing sight of it and the gap is growing. The other thing too, that's happening too, is a lot of people are focused on remote work and zoom and all this stuff. Remote work has fast tracked the workforce disruption, because if you think about it, you don't really have to live in Silicon Valley anymore to work for the tech leaders. If you are in Ohio, Kansas, Argentina, and you have an amazing team and resources. Other companies can come now tap into your local resource pool. So the level the playing field has now leveled and where you are located is no longer a problem. So that's going to even fast-track, the whole aspect and the lines are blurring now with. Partner partners and vendors and people that are working internally. So the workforce is no longer. I'm going to hire this permanent employee. It's this blend of people coming together, bringing their unique intelligence to the table to drive the future forward. One of the best examples I can think of that comes to mind is a few months ago, Microsoft announced this partnership with Tesla because they are actually disrupting space communication. And so if you look at how they're doing it, they're partnered with these 10 major companies combined with their internal resources. And they're using the strengths of each organization to bring a solution together. And that's really the future is who's got what piece that they're really good at and how do we bring them together. So if you think about that, which segues into the other big disruption that I keep bringing up is our organizational systems, charts, processes, metrics. Are not set up to support that future. So we have to get really serious about where we are going? What does our workforce strategy look like? How do we really take a blank piece of paper? And it's not following best practice. It's being creative and innovative, right? it's to sit down and say, this is where we're going. This is my vision for my organization. Okay. How do we get there? Because the ways we've done it before are not going to work. The org charts from before are not going to work. The KPI's and measures are not going to work. The way we recruit is not going to work. Even as deep as the way we lead is no longer going to work, my command and control style for example, is not going to work. It's not a senior leader sitting up at the top and saying, please be innovative. That doesn't work anymore. So what leadership changes do we have to make, to lump this all in a buzzword it's called scenario planning. And business model innovation. And what that really just means in layman's terms, because I'm all about speaking human is to think about the future in a way that's never done before, because you're not going to copy someone Facebook wasn't created by copying somebody, Amazon wasn't created by copying somebody. So really sit down and think about your business. Shell Corp is a great example. Back in the seventies, when there was oil embargo challenges going on, they were actually the only gas and oil company that made it out of that because they sat down and said, forget everything. That's going on. White piece of paper, what are all the scenarios we need to think about? And what do we need to do differently as an organization to change? If you don't do that, what's gonna happen is you're going to get what I call blockbuster video syndrome, which is blockbuster video thought that they were the best thing. And everybody was constantly going to take out VHS or DVD tapes. And as we all know, they're not here anymore. So when you kind of think you're the best and these things aren't going to happen to you, or you try to copy something that somebody is doing right at this given moment, because it works now or they were successful now. Well, that's a little naive, so those are kind of the big ticket things I'm tracking because taking it back to how I started the conversation. You could have the best AI, the best marketing strategy in the world. When you don't have this foundation of people, the new organizational structure that is bringing people together for shared intelligence, including your vendors and partners even how procurement is done differently, right. And you're not being real with the new types of leaders you need. These are the core themes of why a lot of organizations may not be here in the future. And if we look at these things, we can be, and we can be prepared and it can be really exciting.

J: Right. Absolutely. No, that's so insightful. Definitely thanks for drilling a little bit deeper from your perspective. And for the next part of our conversation, I wanna focus a little bit more on you personally Kind of or with 2020 behind those. So, it still feels like we are in 2020, whether it is going on these days, we joke that it's still 2020, the lines have blurred.I don't even know what day is it today? It's December 47th, 2020. So let's treat it that way. So, and I'm not a fan of the whole concept of new year's resolutions because I have a different take on that, but from your standpoint, I'm curious what's currently, on your short term roadmap for you personally, what are you looking to accomplish, what are you focusing on through the next short period? The US is coming out of this very interesting year with going into, hopefully something different, curious to get your take on that and how do we prepare for that?

M: Yeah, that's an awesome question. So one thing, which is kind of tied to my background foundationally, I think we all need to think about changing our story and what I mean by that is when I first met my family and I immigrated here to this country, our story could have very easily been one of why is this happening to me? I don't want to stay here. I want to go back. I can't control any of this because, as I shared my story, a lot of the things I mentioned were a little uncontrollable, but we flipped the story to what is the opportunity here and what can I do differently? And change my mindset to do differently to get out of this. So I think one is that, and I'm challenging myself as well for this, which is obviously you turn on the news and the media and everything is doomsday, right. And also as humans, we are naturally wired for fear for wanting to be comfortable. So if you're, you're not constantly changing, challenging or in a mental state, which I'm challenging myself to do. You're going to get dragged down into the sky is falling. The world is falling apart and I have zero control. So that's kind of foundationally what I've been working on one in 2020, but now actually leading into the new year as well. So I have this interesting thing that I do and I'll, I'll share it with everyone. I'm sure a lot of people have heard Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Where it talked a lot about that on the episodes last year, I was like the whole premise was inserted to interrupt from a perspective, where the bottom level safety, security, all of that we had. How do you still think about innovation? Something, higher level. So that was interesting, but yeah, go on. Oh, totally. Because it's true. We lose sight of the basic needs, right? Safety food shelter to ultimately reach what he had captured your full potential or self-actualization. So through my journey of life, just experiencing everything I have, and then through my career and family and relationships, I said what's my hierarchy of mastering myself and my goals. So I literally have drawn this triangle where I said things are gonna happen to you. Like as a human we're wired a certain way, our zeros and ones are already programmed a certain way. We're gonna want short-term gratification. That's just who we are as a species. we're gonna want things immediately. We're not gonna want pain. We're going to want pleasure. That's just table stakes. That's how we're wired. That's why, when you step back, you see so many people following society, right? Society says have children two and a half kids, white the house, the 401k retire, so we're following systems and processes. So I said, you know what? I have to be real with what I want, not what let's say. My family wants. My boss wants, all these pressures around us. So I literally sit down and I'm asking myself, and I'm doing this actually right now. one of my core values and what, why am I doing what I'm doing? Like, what am I chasing? And it's not necessarily a corporate status or societal things or things in general. I actually just sold my house and left Florida. I own nothing. So what motivates me and really looking at that hard look, and being true with yourself. And I recommend everyone does this. Cause you'll have a lot of what I call holy moly moments where I'm trying not to curse where you're going. Wait, why am I doing this? Is this real? Is this why for me? Or is it because of pressure that's coming from somewhere else? So I really recommend doing that. I call it the hashtag unfollow, the herd process, and being real with yourself. The second is really looking at a long-term mindset versus short. And this goes back to what I mentioned about, we are naturally wired to do things for immediate gratification. That's why we will go spend $5 at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. That's probably 30 cents. Right? So, we are wired for the short term. And so, you have to challenge yourself to think long-term, which is why I constantly recommend going to what you want, why you want it, and then inventorying yourself to say, am I on track? Cause otherwise you're naturally going to go short-term and this applies to self whether it's your financial goals, your fitness and athletic goals relationship goals even and this applies to business as well, because many businesses right now are worried about their quarterly numbers to wall street. And that's it, which is why they struggle with deal delivering on innovation, they're playing the short-term game, not the long-term game. So personally I'm challenging myself. What am I chasing? Where's my mindset at how I plan it? Act on it. If you don't take massive action, you're not going to go anywhere. You can talk about it and read books till forever read about social media, but what's my plan? And then I literally map it every day. I literally say, this is what I'm going to do this week. Then at the end of the week I measure myself and I say, what worked really well? What could I have done better? What fell apart? And then to use our corporate speak, then I literally pivot and say, okay, I'm going to change this week and I do that on a frequent basis because life gets in front of you and very tight. A lot of times you'll pivot off track. The other major thing too is really thinking about where is your time, energy and focus going? We somehow as humans get this is going to sound more breath, but we forget there's an end and we forget there's death. And we run around and we waste so much energy and time. And I've always been baffled on that and now it's even worse right now. We have social media, we're open. We had the news before and now it's everywhere. Your iPhone alerts are going off your text messages. You're going off like distraction is crazy. And so once again, it goes back to being more conscious of what you are doing? Where are you going? So part of what I'm sharing with this measure is I literally inventory my time. I inventory, how much time I'm spending on social media. I inventory the people that are in my life the colleagues that are in my life, where is that time going? And then I kind of carry that over into the corporate world a little bit because we do waste a lot of time. And then the other aspect to that I have found works really well is I put a dollar value on my time and this doesn't have anything to do with what I make or anything like that. But I literally I'm like, okay. I picked a number one, so I was like $150 an hour. Okay. Am I going to check social media? If my bill is $150 an hour? Is that really valuable? And the answer might be yes or am I going to clean my home for three hours? If my bill rate is $150 an hour, when someone can do it, let's say for a hundred, right. Then I actually doubled that rate. Because I said there's opportunity cost. I don't have infinite time. So if I'm spending time with, let's say a colleague for two hours, that's two hours. I'm also losing out on maybe creating a business plan. I don't know. So really inventory or time, and this is not coming from a place of knowing I'm a work in progress, but I'm really trying to get better at knowing what I'm going after, knowing my mindset, inventory, and yet getting feedback and then improving.

J: Right. Absolutely. No, I love these frameworks in a sense it's one thing that also helps me from a standpoint of that particular productivity now, I mean, framework is what I call it. One major accomplishment is because I've noticed that as I was going through my daily task list at the beginning of the day, I would come back at the end of the day and I'm like, crap, I didn't accomplish all of that. So yeah. Like you said, life gets in the way. And so I kind of changed the mindset and stuff. I didn't come up with that concept, but it's a variation of what I've read other successful executives do. It's just really focusing on this one major thing that I want to accomplish today. And I noticed for myself.

M: Yeah, exactly. And if I accomplish that I'm happy, everything else that comes along with that, I find it helps with your mindset too, Jahn, like you don't feel like you feel like okay, I can do this again versus, Oh my God, I can't.

J: Yeah. And it was like, Oh, I got like 50 tasks on my list. Like I'm running around like crazy. So that's some, some color from my perspective there, Michelle last but not least share with us your sources of information. What, what do you do? What do you read? What do you follow? What blogs do you subscribe to? If there's a Twitter profile year, you religiously update. Tell us your, your content diet that I like to call.

M: Yeah, for sure. So I have so many sources I'll touch on a couple. But before I go into that, I wanted to share one thing I do a little differently. I realized years ago that we consume so much information and consuming is not doing. And this actually ties to your point that you made about pick one. So I read a lot of things and I'll share my hit list here in a minute. But one thing that I find is working better. And again, I'm constantly learning and pivoting is to read something. For example, if you read a book, a chapter and there was one nugget that you were like, wow, that that was something that just blew me away. Take that one nugget. Right at wherever you want in your iPhone notes journal and do it like implemented, try it, tweak it. There's a Bruce Lee quote that he takes things from people and what works he keeps and the things that don't have lots of go. We really want to be effective with all the stuff we're consuming, we need to be doing. So that's one takeaway that's actually working really well for me. The second one that I also recently started doing is to challenge your thinking and to challenge what you're actually reading. So a lot of us gravitate towards certain topics. Certain people, I actually am also challenging myself to listen to people I normally wouldn't whether it's on a podcast and also to diversify all the topics. So I listened to health and fitness topics, financial topics, business topics. Relationship topics and you'll find, which is what I've been finding over the last years. Everything is so connected. So when you listen to, let's say a health and fitness podcast there's one I've recently started listening to it's called chasing excellence. That someone turned me on to Bergersen, I'm going to butcher his last name. He's a successful CrossFit coach and one of the top coaches for athletes for CrossFit athletes. And his concepts totally cross over to not only your personal life, business, life innovation, world relationships. So really challenge what you listened to and make sure you're being diverse. Like, just because you're passionate about health and fitness don't listen to just that, just because you're an executive and you need to stay on top of business don't make a hundred percent of your, what you're consuming, just that, but my tops are the one podcast I mentioned was that the other one I listened to is one by Gwyneth Paltrow. It's called Loop. That one has just about every topic you can think of. They also make it very controversial, too. Make you think about your thinking? From a business perspective, I listened to creative planning, which is by Peter Baluk. He speaks what I call human in the financial markets and business. He doesn't use a lot of buzz words. He keeps it real. Book-wise I am reading over Principles by Ray Dalio. He is great at not just obviously the financial investment piece that he's so well known for, but also business and life advice. And I'm also reading one that is around consciousness. I'm very passionate about conscious leadership, mainly because of what I brought up. I think we need to do leadership differently. In business and in life. And it's by Dane Heer, it's called Being you changing the world. if you don't read this, if you look up conscious leadership, it'll give you some insights about how to just be more aware, how to question everything, how to do things differently. The other great one is ego is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday, and an innovation one that's really awesome is zero to one. And it really talks about. And I've actually read that multiple times about changing yourself. The other funny one that I'll share and I'll end with is I actually read and applied a little bit, the five love languages books, not because it's about a personal intimate relationship, but one of the things I find is we all need to do a better job of knowing each other. And what we want from each other and what motivates people. And this obviously crosses over to leadership, you know? So, one person may not be motivated by money or gifts or what have you. One might be motivated by time. So that's a really good one that you don't have to look at it from an intimate relationship lens. You can look at it from an overall relationship with. People are your team lens. It makes you think a little differently. So that's a funny one. I'll share what I'm trying to look at and apply across.

J: Awesome. I love that. I love it. Those recommendations. And for our listeners, we'll make these, all of these listed in the episode notes. So you guys can check them out, subscribe by whatever the case may be. Thank you enough for your time today. It was very insightful, powerful, short conversation, and personally learned quite a bit. Definitely gonna stay in touch. We gotta do another episode. So does a follow-up to dive a little bit deeper in some of the things that you were talking about.

M: Definitely. Thank you so much for your time.

J: Yeah. And I appreciate it. And I think you're doing something that's so important, which is using your voice, and this is going to have a ripple effect, I believe in ripple effects. So I think that this is amazing what you're doing here on this podcast and the diversity of people that you're bringing on and the questions you're asking. So thank you so much for the opportunity to be here with you today.

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