Advancing Opportunities for Others

01 Oct 2018

Advancing Opportunities for Others

A business leader looks for ways to open doors for women and people of color.

Re: Carla Harris (MBA 1987)

Topics: Career-Managing Careers Demographics-Diversity Demographics-Women Career-Awards

Carla Harris (MBA 1987) is vice chairman of Morgan Stanley and a 2018 recipient of the HBS Alumni Achievement Award. In this interview she talks about using her stature as an African American business leader to support leadership opportunities for women and people of color.

“The bulk of my career was actually spent in capital markets. I love, love, love my capital markets job. And I'd go back to capital markets in a heartbeat. However, in around 2006, I kept hearing myself as I was speaking say, ‘If you consider yourself a leader in the 21st century, you must be comfortable taking risks.’ And I had to ask myself, ‘What risk are you taking? You've been doing this for 20 years; you're good at it; you can do four or five deals in a week; and no other company knows that you're working on any other deal. Maybe you've got a little capacity to do something different.’

“I realize, as a senior person of color, when I am invited to a broad industry conference, you can count the number of people of color in the room. So we put together this conference and it has been oversubscribed every year that we've done it. And it's the most senior African-Americans, the most senior Hispanics, the most senior Asians and Indians, that are in corporate America. Very proud of that conference.

“The second thing is we started an in-house, multicultural innovation lab. It is truly an accelerator for entrepreneurial companies that are founded and run by women and multicultural constituents—the only one that exists. Because if you go to some of the large names that I won't name on camera, you will find that they have very few, if any, folks of color in their accelerators. And if you ask them why, they'll say, ‘We can't find any—it's very difficult.’

“Well, I'll have to tell you that we went out on the whisper network, meaning we just put it out in our own networks. We didn't advertise on the web. We didn't advertise on TV. We just told people this is what we're doing. In two weeks, we had 100 submissions for five spots. So that argument that you can't find any—it's done.”

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Featured Alumni

Carla Harris

MBA 1987

Featured Alumni

Carla Harris

MBA 1987

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