Ted talk carla harris3/2/2024 ![]() It was the day many of us had been waiting for: the 2017 Pennsylvania Conference for Women.Īs I entered the press room, journalists from various media outlets were quietly setting up their phones, laptops, and tablets to spread the messages of empowerment, love, and inspiration that several amazing women were about to share.Įach one of these women brought with them a distinct characteristic as they took the stage, and as we were all waiting with anticipation for the main headliner, Former First Lady Michelle Obama, the sound of feverish typing began. Twelve thousand women (and men) anxiously waiting for the doors to open at the Philadelphia Convention Center. She sang with the world-renowned Radcliffe Chorale Society, the oldest women’s singing group at Harvard, and in her own band called Rhythm Company.Lines around the block. While at Harvard University, she continued singing. She sang in both Catholic and Baptist choirs when she was 13 years old. Harris, born on October 28, 1962, in Port Arthur, Texas and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, began singing at an early age. Why not? It’s not like this is that hard,” she added. And I really did not see a lot of people of color and I didn’t see very many women. So when you tell me I can’t do something, I was all over it. The other thing that was attractive is I am negatively motivated. And I certainly realized in finance people could do that. “And, you know, I wanted to make a lot of money. “I was 19 years old and there I was, actually working on analysis and spreadsheets upon which people were making decisions to issue millions of dollars of bonds. ![]() “I wanted to have a lot of responsibility very early on,” she told Bloomberg. She added that she realized that business people really called the shots and the lawyers helped get it done within the context of the law. She later got exposed to finance and realized that the things she thought were found in the law were actually found in finance. “Everybody in my family said, ‘You’re going to be a lawyer,’” she told Bloomberg. Harris wanted to be a lawyer when she entered Harvard because she loved Perry Mason at the time and also loved to argue her point. She is now a senior client adviser to the firm. In 2021, she announced that she was stepping down as Morgan Stanley’s vice chairman of wealth management. So you know that if you wanted to play on this playing field, you were going to have to be comfortable in some cases being the only and being the first. “That’s what you saw at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, you pick it. “It didn’t intimidate me,” she told Bloomberg about the lack of diversity at Wall Street when she joined. Another commissioned diversity report in 2020 noted that of the 1,056 executives, 16 were Black men and 18 were Black women A diversity report by Morgan Stanley in 2020 noted that 23 of its executives in 2018 were Black men and 14 were Black women. When Harris first joined Wall Street, it was mostly run by White men and the status quo has not changed significantly. She became the chair of the firm’s Private Placement Commitment Equity Committee and after more than a decade, she became a senior member of the Equity Syndicate desk, where she executed such transactions as initial public offerings for UPS, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and the $3.2 billion common stock transaction for Immunex Corporation, the largest biotechnology follow-on offering in U.S. She later became the Managing Director of Global Capital Markets for the firm where she was responsible for the structuring, marketing and execution of public and private equity financings. She started as an investment banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions department. She joined Morgan Stanley after getting a bachelor’s degree and her MBA from Harvard University. ![]() In 1987, Carla Harris started her career at Morgan Stanley and steadily rose through the ranks to become one of the most powerful and senior Black women on Wall Street.
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