Arshiya Kherani

🌙 T'was The Night Before Eid The night before Eid always created a buzz in our house growing up. Sometimes my sisters and I were lucky enough to get henna on our hands; we’d excitedly sleep on old sheets on the bedroom floor and wake up to the smell of dried henna on our pillows. The house was always busy: ironing our best clothes, my parents marinating biryani for our semi-annual Eid dinner, taking turns straightening our hair, picking out favorite costume jewelry to go with our Indian...

😰 Millennial Heart Break Millennials were getting our first jobs out of college when brands like Everlane and Allbirds introduced us to a new idea: that buying things could be an act of integrity. We weren't just consumers, we were conscious consumers of ethical production, sustainable wool, and radical transparency. And brands and customers alike were absolutely swooning. This weekend, I taught a storytelling workshop to eight entrepreneurs for The Jazba Collective, and I used Everlane as...

😰 The Dreaded Question A client was recently promoted to Director of Client Relationships. One of her first business lunches in her new role brought her to a 1:1 conversation with a 60-year-old man from a legacy family in the South...the kind of person whose network can open doors for her and her organization, beyond what we can probably imagine. She had done her research, and had a slew of amazing questions to guide the conversation. She felt great...until her client asked her the ONE...

🤖 AI Can Do It...But Can It Make The Case? One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was while giving a presentation I was genuinely proud of in the moment. I had the full attention of my agency's managers, directors, and executives. My presentation was full of pretty slides and impressive numbers. I thought the data would speak for itself, but the feedback I generally got from the highest-level executives was, "What was the point of your presentation?" For context, I was the Head of...

🕳️ Networking To Nowhere As someone who lives in LA, I often find myself going to a lot of events just because they are "a vibe." Sometimes they end up being genuinely valuable...but other times, the session ends and I walk away having done a lot of networking to nowhere. Not enough people offering real value, just a lot of people there to get something, social climb, or be a part of a scene. Some people are just there to be in community, which sometimes I am too. My job is to develop my...

The Knowledge Gap My mom and I were at the farmers market last weekend and sampling coconut water from a little stand. The woman running it mentioned they import the coconuts from Thailand every week. My mom immediately laughed and said, "you must be getting hit hard with tariffs!" The woman looked at her blankly. "What are tariffs?" My mom and I looked at each other. I immediately wondered...how can she not know what tariffs are?! I wondered if the tariffs actually didn't hit on Thai food...

🗺️ The One Without The Roadmap I was brought in to build a customer experience function from scratch. The role was newly carved out with me in mind, or so I was told... It was a big step up from individual contributor to a managerial function on the strategy team, serving the agency's highest growth clients. My manager seemed excited, so was I. My first assignment: write your own 90-day plan. At first, it sounded exciting, but it turns out this was the red flag I ignored. Nobody reviewed it,...

🧿 My Secret To Taking The Ick Out Of Networking Instead of leading with the usual "so what do you do," at a networking event, I ask: what brought you here today? People tell me something real, and what I've found is that it kicks off a real conversation about what led us to this particular room. It takes the ick out of networking. A few weeks ago I overheard a stranger ask a variation of my question. They asked, what do you want to get out of today?, and then introduced themselves based on...

🧵 A 20 Hour Day My alarm went off at 5:15 am at an annoyingly high pitch; I rolled over to slam snooze to my "alien alarm clock song," as my husband calls it (if you have an iPhone, you might know exactly which sound this is...) I am not an early riser, but I stumbled out of bed fairly quickly, changed, and ran out the door to catch my flight up to the Bay. I was heading up to facilitate a 3-hour session at The Jazba Collective's Fellowship Kickoff weekend. My role was to guide 30+ South...