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Action Plan: Role-Play
Re: Sarah Carson (MBA 1971); By: Christine Speer Lejeune; photo by Christina GandolfoTopics: Career/Life ExperiencePsychology and Social Psychology-GeneralHuman Resources-Employees

Action Plan: Role-Play
Re: Sarah Carson (MBA 1971); By: Christine Speer Lejeune; photo by Christina GandolfoTopics: Career/Life ExperiencePsychology and Social Psychology-GeneralHuman Resources-Employees
Action Plan: Role-Play
When you encounter the phrase private investigator, chances are good the character you conjure up in your mind doesn’t resemble Sarah Carson (MBA 1971). So much the better for Carson, whose work has often required convincing people she was a small-business employee rather than an undercover investigator trying to suss out other employees who are guilty of committing fraud, theft, or some other workplace misconduct.
Before her career path took a turn from the business world to private investigation, Carson had no prior exposure to the field; she did, however, have plenty of experience in defying expectations. An Iowa-born farm girl who moved east to attend Bryn Mawr in 1963, she went on to apply to HBS at a time when few women did so. (“Dear, that’s a trade school,” announced the academic dean at Bryn Mawr when Carson shared her MBA plans.) Entering HBS in 1969, she was one of just 22 women in a class of 750. But no matter: “I never really felt that I didn’t belong,” she says.
How to: Go undercover
Stick close to the real story.
“The story of who you are should be as close to the truth as possible. It’s less remembering what you told people.”
Envision your “truth.”
Carson advises having complete images in your head for whatever story you’ve invented. “When you’re telling people about something that never happened, you can’t do that with a blank slate in your mind; you have to have a picture.”
Lay off the social media.
“If I’m in some company impersonating an accounts payable clerk, and somebody has seen [me online], they can say, ‘No, that’s not who she is.’ I find that younger people are often not very savvy about what they say, or what they present.”
How to: Go undercover
Stick close to the real story.
“The story of who you are should be as close to the truth as possible. It’s less remembering what you told people.”
Envision your “truth.”
Carson advises having complete images in your head for whatever story you’ve invented. “When you’re telling people about something that never happened, you can’t do that with a blank slate in your mind; you have to have a picture.”
Lay off the social media.
“If I’m in some company impersonating an accounts payable clerk, and somebody has seen [me online], they can say, ‘No, that’s not who she is.’ I find that younger people are often not very savvy about what they say, or what they present.”
Over the next two decades, Carson held several roles in product development before shifting in the late 1970s to focus on small-business banking at Manufacturers Hanover Trust. In 1983, she moved from New York to California, taking a job with First Interstate Bank and dabbling in financial consulting for friends—a reasonably interesting career path, Carson would tell you. Yet when she took time off in 1988 to attend to family issues back in Iowa, the prospect of returning to the corporate world filled her with dread. She needed a change, though she couldn’t have guessed that it would come in the form of an advertisement she saw in the Los Angeles Times for the Nick Harris Detective Academy.
“I thought, ‘Well, I like reading mystery stories,’ ” she says with a laugh—and, on a whim, decided to give the school a shot. She loved the work so much that after graduation she took a job as an investigator for the State Bar of California, where she spent years looking into alleged rule violations by its members. When, in 1998, state budget cuts gutted her department, Carson—by then an experienced, licensed investigator—decided to open her own shop.
Her first clients were lawyers, but Carson’s investigations soon branched into small businesses, where fraud is a particular problem, she says, because, compared to larger firms, “there aren’t as many controls.” She often found it helpful to go undercover as, say, a new accounting clerk, a bookkeeper, an office manager—roles she played so naturally that nobody questioned her. In one instance, Carson suspected the woman in charge of payroll might turn out to be a separate problem from the case she’d been hired to investigate.
“I watched her,” Carson says. “She never did any work.” And voila: The do-nothing employee in charge of payroll turned out to be padding her own paychecks.
This work was Carson’s focus until 2013, when she shifted again, prompted by a fellow Bryn Mawr alumna who worked in show business: “If you aren’t an actress, you should be,” the woman told her. “They’ll love your look!” Carson began taking acting lessons. Within a handful of years, what began as a hobby morphed into a new career as a successful actor, with roles in Lifetime and ABC television movies, TV series, films, and shorts.
Here again, of course, Carson is an outlier. “There aren’t that many people in my age range acting right now,” she says. “And the ones who are, have mostly been in it for 40, 50 years.” Carson, meanwhile, continues to manage money for friends and to run her PI business. She credits her many experiences—including all those gigs pretending to be someone else—for a certain ease she has with sliding into acting roles. Her time at HBS, she adds, also played a part in this.
“I certainly learned persistence there,” she says. “To keep going, to find your way around obstacles that present themselves—the trick to doing what you want to do is to not give up.”
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