Carla Harris

Carla Harris is a Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley and a bestselling author who speaks on leadership, career success, and diversity and inclusion for corporate and association audiences worldwide.

In her 30-plus year career as a Morgan Stanley investment banker, Carla served as Vice Chairman of Wealth Management, working across the technology, media, retail, telecommunications, transportation, industrial, and healthcare sectors. She now serves as co-portfolio manager of the firm’s Next Level Fund and as an advisor to the Multicultural Innovation Lab, which she helped found, and she hosts the award-winning “Access and Opportunity” podcast. In August 2013, President Barack Obama appointed her to chair the National Women’s Business Council. She currently serves on the boards of Walmart, Cummins, and MetLife, in addition to Sesame Workshop and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity.

Named one of the Top 50 speakers in the world in 2023 and one of the Top 40 female speakers in the world in 2020, Carla engages audiences with her signature “Carla’s Pearls,” sharing the hard-earned lessons of her Wall Street career to help both emerging and established leaders maximize their success. Her most recent book, Lead to Win, distills her pearls of Intentional Leadership; it won a 2024 Anthem Award and a Bookfest Award and helped earn her a Crain’s Diversity & Inclusion Lifetime Achievement Award. Her earlier books, Expect to Win and Strategize to Win, are both national bestsellers.

Carla has been named to Fortune’s list of “The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives in Corporate America” and its Most Influential List, American Banker’s Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Finance, Black Enterprise’s Top 75 Most Powerful Women in Business, and Essence’s “50 Women Who Are Shaping the World,” among many others. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, and Barron’s.

Beyond Wall Street, Carla is an accomplished gospel recording artist who has sold out concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater and released four Gospel CDs, including “O This is Christmas” and “Unceasing Praise.”

Categories: Business Leader, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Featured, Leadership, New to AEISpeakers

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Topics

CARLA’S PEARLS

Carla uses her signature “Carla’s Pearls” to discuss the components of positioning yourself to maximize your career success as a leader or individual contributor in your work environment. She explores the concepts of performance currency vs. relationship currency, managing through and creating change and how to strategically navigate any culture and cultivate impactful relationships.

INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP

Millennials and Generation Zers are now the dominant populations in the workplace, and they demand table stakes, transparency, inclusivity, and feedback from their leaders. In this talk, Carla speaks about the eight pearls of intentional leadership – authenticity, building trust, clarity, creating other leaders, diversity, innovation, inclusivity, and voice as essentials for showing up as a powerful, impactful, influential leader in today’s work environment.

PERFORMANCE VS. RELATIONSHIP CURRENCY

Carla coined the terms, Performance Currency and Relationship Currency. In this talk she defines both terms and the value of each, illuminates the importance of having both, and identifies how to “spend” each to maximize the yield in your career. You will learn how use both currencies to optimize your success in any role and maximize your overall career success.

Driving Competitiveness, Innovation, and Sustainability with Diversity

In this speech, Carla speaks about the commercial imperative for DEI and delivers impactful arguments around the “why”, and “how”. She explores these questions: Why focus on Diversity and Inclusion, what are the strategies to achieve diverse workforces, how to identify bias, how to sustain a successful DEI effort, how will you know when you are “there”.

LETTER TO MY 25 YEAR OLD SELF

Carla gives a riveting delivery of the advice that she would give to her 25-year old self, the ambitious, fiery, confident business school graduate who was ready to take on the business and finance world with no clue about the challenges, trials, obstacles that lay ahead. This is a crowd favorite! Relatable with any professional level.

EXPECT TO WIN

Proven strategies that have helped Carla and that will help you to maximize your success in the seat that you are sitting in or the seat that you aspire to sit in. She will discuss the importance of perceptions in the workplace, the key relationships that you must have in order to ensure your success and the power of authenticity as your distinct competitive advantage.

Books

Lead to Win: How to Be a Powerful, Impactful, Influential Leader in Any Environment

Lead to Win: How to Be a Powerful, Impactful, Influential Leader in Any Environment

In this much-needed book, powerhouse Carla A. Harris examines the journey from individual contributor to leader. She targets the essential skills necessary to succeed, such as the importance of taking risks, creating a vision, and leveraging assets like relationships and partnerships.

You can purchase this book here

Strategize to Win: The New Way to Start Out, Step Up, or Start Over in Your Career

Strategize to Win: The New Way to Start Out, Step Up, or Start Over in Your Career

Appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the National Women’s Business Council in 2013, Carla Harris knows that the working world isn’t what it used to be. Addressing these changes, Harris’s new book gives today’s readers the tools they need to get started, get “unstuck” from bad situations, redirect momentum, and position themselves to manage their career no matter what the economic environment or job market might be.

You can purchase this book here

Expect to Win: 10 Proven Strategies for Thriving in the Workplace

Expect to Win: 10 Proven Strategies for Thriving in the Workplace

How to survive and thrive in any economic climate with proven strategies from a powerhouse Carla Harris, one of the most powerful and respected women in business, shares advice, tips, and strategies for surviving in any workplace environment.

You can purchase this book here

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