Risha Grant | Source | Founder & CEO of Risha Grant LLC | Author of "Be Better Than Your BS" | Speak...

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Risha Grant

Founder & CEO of Risha Grant LLC | Author of "Be Better Than Your BS" | Speaker at Risha Grant LLC
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Risha Grant is diversity personified: CEO. Entrepreneur. Black. Female. Small-town born and raised. Bisexual. Spiritual. Ex-preacher’s wife. Cusser. Left-handed. Former Division 1 athlete. But these traits alone aren’t what make her one of the most powerful and effective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) experts in the US. Hailed as a “cultural competency genius” and renowned for her storytelling chops, humor, and frank delivery, she has made a career of leading her audiences as well as executives and their teams, politicians, civic leaders, and academic directors around the world to Radical Acceptance (RA) through a unique bias-busting process of self-examination and concrete advice on how to behave, lead, and manage businesses more inclusively. She is the author of That’s BS! How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures and the Power to Attract Diverse Markets and Be Better Than Your BS: How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Workplace Culture of Inclusion.

In her role as a speaker and CEO of a multi-million dollar business, Grant has shifted the hearts and minds of her audiences and clients from around the world, including Google, Levi Strauss, Nestle Purina, Xerox, YouTube, Procter & Gamble, Discover Card Financial Services, Samsung Electronics America, Cox Communications, U.S. Airforce, U.S. Navy, Intuit, NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, and Harvard University.

She’s been featured in various national and international media including Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, HR News, The Financial Times, Glamour Magazine UK, Bloomberg Media, and Black Enterprise, among others. She is also the author of two books: That’s BS! How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures and the Power to Attract Diverse Markets and Be Better Than Your BS: How Radical Acceptance Empowers Authenticity and Creates a Culture of Inclusion.

Grant has received numerous honors such as being named one of the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR, one of the 40 Top Women Keynote Speakers, and made the list of Top 100 HR Experts. She was named as 1 in 9 Speakers Turning Crisis into Opportunity by Entrepreneur magazine, and for three consecutive years been an Engagedly Top 100 HR Influencer and Entrepreneur of the Year.

Grant will freely admit that she is a work in progress. She occasionally misuses pronouns. She prejudges others. Sometimes she walks in fear. Yet she has consistently striven to focus on love, and made it her mission to use her passion, persistence, knowledge, and experience to dismantle racism, sexism, classism, and plain old stupidism—including her own. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with her partner, where when not teaching people how to challenge bias she is busy being the world’s best auntie.

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  • "For many years I did my best to hide my diversity, thinking it was the only way for a person like me to succeed. There were days I couldn’t buy food, and I had my lights, gas, and cable cut off. But I kept going, trying to overcome people’s biases, knowing all the while any success I achieved was contingent on the soul-sapping effort I constantly made to look, speak, and be the way corporate America wanted me to. Finally, I came out freely as myself—cussin’, country, Ebonics, and all. I started talking in my normal ‘Black’ voice. I wore my hair exactly the way I wanted to. I thought my career was finished. Today, I speak to thousands of people per month about the existence, persistence, and evidence of bias in the workplace, and how eliminating it is not only a moral imperative but a financial one. And every time, after realizing they can’t fix a problem they can’t see, someone asks, ‘So what do I do now?’ You become better than your BS. How? Through Radical Acceptance (RA).”

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