In Personal Board of Directors, top business leaders talk about the people they turn to for advice, and how those people have shaped their perspective and helped them succeed. Previous installments from the series are here.
Veteran Morgan Stanley executive Carla Harris faced a series of challenges as her career progressed. The more difficult the obstacles, the more she says she wanted to overcome them.
There aren’t that many Black women on Wall Street. Working on the mergers and acquisitions team for a major investment bank is demanding. There aren’t many women of color in finance leadership positions.
Ms. Harris, 60, overcame enough hurdles over more than three decades to become one of the most senior Black women in finance. Now she wants others to follow in her path. “If you’re a boomer like me, it was no strange thing to be the first, or to be the only one in the room,” Ms. Harris said. “My thing was, if I can go there and be really good, then I won’t be the only one that’s in the room.”
Ms. Harris first joined Morgan Stanley in 1987, after graduating from Harvard Business School. She worked in mergers and acquisitions and capital markets, where she raised money for companies to go public. After she helped price the 1999 initial public offering of United Parcel Service, which was the largest-ever IPO at the time, she became a managing director. She was 37 years old.
She took on a number of other assignments for the bank, working on a fund that would invest in women and minority money managers and heading multicultural strategy. She was named vice chair in 2014, one of the few Black women to then hold that role. Currently she is a senior client advisor at Morgan Stanley and serves on the boards of retailer Walmart Inc., manufacturing company Cummins Inc. and insurer Metlife Inc.
Ms. Harris also emerged as a visible source of career advice, with speeches where she provides what she calls “Carla’s Pearls” and three books. Her most recent, “Lead to Win,” published this year. An accomplished singer, she also has performed five concerts at Carnegie Hall and two at the Apollo Theater.
Ms. Harris relies on certain people for her own advice, including a former Harvard professor, a college friend, a former Morgan Stanley banker and a fellow corporate director. She also draws from the influence of her mother and grandmother, who set high expectations for Ms. Harris while growing up in Texas and Florida. Her mother was a physical education teacher, assistant dean and an assistant principal. Her grandmother—an entrepreneur who employed people in the neighborhood—had a “straight, no chaser” approach, which she says she inherited.
One piece of advice she said she remembers: “‘Baby whatever you be, be good at it.’”
