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Carla Harris (MBA 1987)
Carla Harris (MBA 1987)
When she went off to Harvard College, Carla Ann Harris (MBA 1987) was pretty sure she wanted to be a lawyer. “I loved Perry Mason at the time and I loved to argue my point,” she told Bloomberg Markets. But her experience with the nonprofit Sponsors for Educational Opportunity changed her mind. The program, which offers educational and career support to students from underserved communities, helped Harris realize something: she loved finance. “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,” she says.
Today, Harris is vice chairman of global wealth management and a senior client adviser at Morgan Stanley in New York, which she joined in 1987. Harris says she wasn’t intimidated by the lack of diversity on Wall Street at the time; however, she did have a few learning moments along the way. At her first-year evaluation, Harris realized she hadn’t built the right relationships to ensure that her work was well-positioned. In addition, she was working for an individual who questioned her work at every turn. “I finally started to realize … that the reason that I was working for this person over and over again was because [the other associates] were refusing to,” she says. “So I started looking through a different lens and realized that I had the power to also say, ‘No más.’”
Harris notes that minority representation on Wall Street has improved since she joined Morgan Stanley 33 years ago. “…it used to be so gnarly that I could name every [Black] person on Wall Street, let alone every senior [Black] person on Wall Street,” she says. While that’s not true today, Harris believes the focus on diversity is largely a bull market phenomenon—which makes it difficult to build a consistent pipeline of senior leaders. “…we are way behind where we could be if we had had…a regular rhythm with respect to people of color and women from, I’d say, 1990, ’92, which is when most firms started really focusing on it,” she says.
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