Wonder Woman in Business, Meenakshi Iyer

Susan Freeman

February 23, 2021

Diversity & Inclusion, MarTech, Strategy, Team Building

Meenakshi Iyer is a global citizen, an inclusive and collaborative servant leader, and a professional thinker and doer. "Stop. Breathe. Think. Act." is her motto.

Born and raised in India, she has been in the US for over a decade now. She is fluent in four languages; and has lived and worked in 10+ cities in India and the US. She is passionate about democratizing access to, and opportunity for, people development across the world.

Meenakshi founded NorthStar Solutions and Services in August 2019 – as a 100% virtual business - to partner with mid-career IT/Agile professionals and leaders, and small to medium-sized businesses, globally, in designing successful outcomes for their transformation journeys, especially in this digital, VUCA economy. She partners with them to help them learn and adopt ‘Future of Work’ skills and behaviors such as: agile, collaborative, and inclusive ways of working; remote leadership; and impactful change communication.

A T-shaped servant leader with a 22-year international and interdisciplinary career in IT, Agile/Business Process Transformation, international healthcare, HR, and Training, she is a champion of cross-cultural and cross-functional leadership. Having started off in the non-profit healthcare sector in India where, among other things, she learned the inner workings of a regional eye bank, the breadth and depth of her professional experience span cultures, geographies, industries, and hierarchies.

Meenakshi is an IC Agile certified Agile Coach (ICP-ACC), and her Agile experience is in B2B product development and client implementation in the healthcare space in the US. She excels in the application of Lean and Human-centered Design in organizational and agile transformations.

As a professionally trained and an experienced ESL Trainer, she has helped hundreds of aspiring and working professionals become proficient in their use of business English. She is particularly empathetic towards the challenges faced by non-native speakers of English in the workplace; and has consistently worked towards making culturally competent communication central to creating inclusive work environments.

Meenakshi holds an Executive MBA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; a BS in Physics from Bharathiar University, India, and an Advanced Diploma in Software Engineering also from India. She has an Executive Master's Certificate from MIT Sloan School of Management in Business Process Design for Strategic Management; and is a Scrum Alliance Certified ScrumMaster®. She is currently on her path to earning an ICF-PCC credential as a Professional Coach.

An active member of the Lean In Agile community – a professional networking group for women professionals in the Lean/Agile space - Meenakshi is on the Catalyst team for the Washington DC area Spiral group. She lives in Ashburn, Virginia in the US, with her husband. In their free time, they enjoy going on road trips to the countryside, and visiting local wineries and breweries.