Meet Yogesh Bahl,
Former Managing Director
After working at AlixPartners for approximately seven and a half years, Yogesh has transitioned from running a practice at a top consulting firm to running the Finance and Investor Relations departments as CFO at a pharmaceutical company. Yogesh’s years of delivering finance, strategic alliance, operations, investigations, and dispute consulting services have prepared him for his CFO role. One of the key aspects of Yogesh’s success is his ability to leverage diversity of thoughts and diversity of cultures among his colleagues and connections. As an example, Yogesh leveraged his eight-year-long study of Hebrew and the Jewish culture to shape his multicultural identity. “Growing up in the Bronx, I really appreciated my childhood,” he said. “I was exposed to a lot of diversity and so many different cultures, and that actually turned out to be a strength for me because now I can easily have an insightful conversation with anyone leading to an exchange of ideas and perspectives.”
Yogesh stayed in New York City for his undergraduate degree in accounting and international business, working almost full-time through the four years. He answered a newspaper advertisement to land his first job after college – as an investigator and auditor for a law firm – and after getting his MBA a few years later, entered into consulting by leveraging his network. “I just took a chance early on and that led me to the consulting industry for more than 20 years before further investing in my career as CFO of IACTA Pharmaceuticals,” he said.
Early in his professional life, Yogesh took another chance that served him well – volunteering to work on projects in Japan for an extended period, without having traveled there prior or knowing a word of Japanese. The clients were so impressed with Yogesh’s ability to create diverse teams, evaluate operations, and execute investigations successfully, that they not only expanded his role but also recommended him to other corporations and law firms.
“I ended up spending five years delivering work in Japan,” Yogesh said, eventually becoming fairly fluent in Japanese. He then worked in South Korea for three years and Taiwan for another two years. “Traveling and working in different places makes you realize that no matter where you go, people are very similar: They want the same things, they think about the same things. We needlessly allow cultures, languages, and unconscious biases get in the way of properly understanding each other.”
Yogesh’s career journey continues to be fueled by his personal belief that being able to teach perpetuates the hunger to learn. Regardless of whom Yogesh may come across in his life, he believes in suspending presumptions and unconscious bias with the goal of learning and advancing. “I believe that the process of figuring out a solution is more valuable than finding the ‘right answer’.”
