The Closing Bell – 4/30/12

NYSE Euronext Photos

The Women’s Bond Club Board of Directors and Annual Merit Award Winners Visit the NYSE and Ring The Closing Bell®

Carla Harris CNR 105th Commencement Speaker

Women’s Bond Club Honors Carla Harris & Kay Koplovitz of USA Network

Women’s Bond Club Honors Carla Harris of Morgan Stanley and Kay Koplovitz, Founder, USA Network

33 Rising Stars from across the financial industry also to be recognized at the 19thAnnual Merit Award Dinner, hosted by NYSE Euronext.
NEW YORK, April 24, 2012 /BusinessWire/ — The Women’s Bond Club, the first organization in New York to focus on women in finance, today announced that Morgan Stanley Managing Director Carla Harris and Kay Koplovitz, Founder, USA Network will  receive the organization’s two most prestigious awards at its annual dinner event on April 30, 2012 at Cipriani Wall Street.

Ms. Carla Harris will receive the Merit Award, presented to a senior leader for her career accomplishments in financial services. Harris is a Managing Director and heads the Emerging Manager Platform at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. In her role, Harris provides investment advice to corporations, public pension plans, foundations and endowments. She formerly headed the equity capital markets effort for the consumer and retail industries at Morgan Stanley, and was responsible for equity private placements. Ms. Harris began her career with Morgan Stanley in the Mergers & Acquisitions department in 1987.  For more than a decade, Ms. Harris was a senior member of the equity syndicate desk and executed transactions such as the initial public offerings for UPS, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Redback, as well as the General Motors sub-IPO of Delphi Automotive – among many others.

Ms. Harris lives the Women’s Bond Club motto of ‘lead, learn and return’ in all that she does. She is the author of Expect to Win: 10 Proven Strategies for Thriving in the Workplace and often serves as a guest speaker inspiring others to believe in the power of their dreams and achieve success. She is the Chair of the Board of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and sits on the boards of the Food Bank for NYC, The Executive Leadership Council, The Toigo Foundation, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, A Better Chance, Inc., The Apollo Theatre Foundation, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Xavier University, and the Maya Angelou Research Center on Minority Health.  She received an MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB in economics from Harvard University.

Ms. Kay Koplovitz will receive the Isabel Benham Award, presented to a woman who has made a significant contribution to the greater community of women. This recognition spotlights Ms. Koplovitz for her commitment to women entrepreneurs. Kay Koplovitz is the Founder of USA Network and the SciFi Channel, Chairman and CEO of Koplovitz and Company and Chairman and Co-Founder of Springboard Enterprises. Springboard Enterprises is a national organization that fosters venture capital investments in women-led high growth companies. Companies selected and presented by Springboard have raised over $5.5 Billion. Ms. Koplovitz is also co-founder of Boldcap Ventures, an early stage fund focused on media, technology and life sciences.  Amongst her very many accomplishments, Ms. Koplovitz was also presidentially appointed as Chair of National Women’s Business Council from 1998-2001, and she authored, “Bold Women, Big Ideas” to inspire women entrepreneurs to create wealth through equity. Kay Koplovitz presently serves as Chairman of the Board of Liz Claiborne Inc. and is a board member of CA Technologies and ION Media. Previously, she has served on the boards of Instinet, Oracle Nabisco, General Re and Sun New Media. She serves as trustee of the The Paley Center for Media as well as Babson College and The University of Wisconsin-Madison, College of Letters & Science.

Duncan L. Niederauer, Chief Executive Officer of NYSE Euronext (NYX), will serve as the keynote speaker for the Award Dinner event, which will also recognize the future of women in finance with the presentation of the Women’s Bond Club Rising Stars Awards to 33 emerging leaders in the financial services industry.

These women and their firms are:

Accenture
Amanda Nelson
AXA Equitable
Maisha O’Neal
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Julie Hong
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Kristine Louis Reynal
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Jing Shih
Barclays
Ashley Higgins
Bloomberg
Anna Karwowska
BNY Mellon
Mirela Cabej
Broadridge Financial Solutions
Christine Ballance
CAPCO
Michelle Stickels
Citi Group
Priya Rajani
Commerzbank AG
Shannon Buckley
Credit Suisse
Meha Jain
Credit Suisse IT
Megan Hamilton
Deloitte Consulting
Karmen Ehman
Ernst & Young LLP
Courtney Lazzari
Goldman Sachs & Co.
Katie Larson
IBM
Amy Meckes
ICAP
Nita Patel
Invesco
Christine Chung
Jefferies
Shabari Nayak
Morgan Stanley
Stacie Selinger
MphasiS
Aarti Gokhale
NasdaqOMX
Rebecca Cameron
Nomura Securities International, Inc.
Alexis Knopp
NYSE Euronext
Reagan Anderson
PIMCO
Naila Makhdumi
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Christine Cataldo
RBS Securities Inc.
Casey Spezznao
S&P Capital IQ
Louisa Pritchett
Standard & Poor’s
Ana Lai
SunGard Data Systems
Renate Kenney
Thomson Reuters
Aileen Brown

Established in 1921, the Women’s Bond is a non-profit organization dedicated to the professional development and networking of women in financial services.  The Women’s Bond Club prides itself on being more than a network; it is a vital community of experienced women across financial services who share a common mission, “to advance women’s leadership, grow our intellectual capital, and return worth to our companies, communities and upcoming generations.” These goals are accomplished by sponsoring events and community service activities and by developing relationships with corporate sponsors and other not-for-profit institutions that support women.  Key to its mission is the scholarship program for young women enrolled in undergraduate university programs focused on business.  The Women’s Bond Club membership reflects buy-side and sell-side across financial services, and a cross-section of executive management, consulting and technology functions.  For more information on the Women’s Bond Club, please visit www.womensbondclub.com.

Proceeds from the annual Merit Award Dinner go to the Women’s Bond Club and its many charitable giving programs which focus on assisting in college preparedness for girls interested in careers in business and finance and the WBC College Scholarship Program.

For additional information on the Women’s Bond Club Merit Award Dinner, please contact Rachel Tepp, 646-336-6800, ext. 105; rachel@sequence-events.com of Morgan Stanley and Kay Koplovitz, Founder, USA Network

Blog for Week of March 5, 2012

Question from VM in Colorado:

I am a new leader that has been promoted to manage 100 people, what 3 pieces of advice would you have for me as a new leader that will help me to be long term successful and respected as a leader?

First of all, congratulations on your promotion and a job well done. You have clearly created performance currency for yourself and demonstrated to the decision makers in your organization, that you are ready for and worthy of the new challenge of managing a large group of people.
While there is a lot that I would like to say to you about leadership, you have asked for three pieces of advice, so here goes:

1. Be Your Authentic Self. Show your team the real you and let them get to know the real you. When you are bringing your real self to a leadership role, you will instill trust in the relationship between you and those who work for and with you. Trust is at the heart of any strong relationship and you want those who work with you to know that they can trust you. They can trust you to give them credit for their work, they can trust you to give them honest feedback, they can trust you to back them up in the organization; if your team feels that they can trust you, they will go the extra mile for you and they will also have your back;
2. Be clear about your expectations. Make sure that your team understands what success looks like to you. If they are clear on what is expected of them, then they are positioned to deliver excellence and it will also make it easier for you to deliver criticism or harsh news when appropriate because you have created an efficient process where everyone knows what a well executed product or process looks like or does not;
3. Leverage your team. Create an environment where your team wants to contribute; they want to be a part of delivering a job well done for your group. They feel comfortable that they will be rewarded for their contributions and they won’t be ridiculed or fired for trying something new when it may fail. You must remember that you do not have a monopoly on intelligence. You may occupy the leadership position, but you will not always have the best idea or the right answer. You want to create a dynamic where you can freely leverage the team’s ideas to get to the best outcome. Create an environment where people are comfortable taking risks to contribute the “out of the box” idea, or taking on a tough assignment, or where they are not afraid to fail. If your team is afraid to fail, afraid of the repercussions, then they will not endeavor to be creative, to go the extra mile, or to innovate.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Blog for Week of Feb 27, 2012

Managing your Career through Ambiguity and Change

Question  from QD in New York: My company has gone through a massive reorganization and restructuring and we are still finalizing the company’s organizational structure and it is not clear who will have a job and who won’t, how can I manage my career amidst so much uncertainty?

Change is inevitable, growth is good! I first made this declaration at a speech in 2006 at the Harlem Black Achievers Awards Gala. There is no company, no organization, or person that can remain competitive or sustain a leadership position if it is unwilling to change. Change is an inevitable part of every organism and every entity’s life and if you consider yourself a leader then you must be willing and able to change, and in fact you must create change, if possible.  Part of the strategy for successfully managing through change is to demonstrate that you are comfortable with change.
While change is inevitable, ambiguity is not.  Ambiguity is a function of the leadership’s strategy and how they are choosing to manage the change within the organization. It may very well be that the leadership has chosen to implement the new strategy step by step to see how the organization will respond to each change and give itself the flexibility to make changes as appropriate or even to develop the strategy step by step instead of delivering a fully developed strategy to the organization. It may be that change has to happen quickly and the leadership does not have the luxury of time to figure it all out before rolling it out to the organization. In this scenario there will be some ambiguity and it will affect the organization’s productivity level. However, you do not have to be a part of the paralysis or declining productivity that may impact the environment.
Here are a few things that you can do to successfully operate in an ambiguous environment:

1. Deliver excellence, create performance currency. Your objective is to approach your job every day with a goal to deliver excellence. Whatever your assignment is, you must go in every day to do an outstanding job. Doing an outstanding job creates performance currency. When you have performance currency, you have something that will be attractive to a prospective new leader in the organization. Performance currency means that you have consistently done a great job in all of your endeavors, you have a reputation for excellent execution, and you can use it to buy you a conversation with someone who may be putting together a new team in the organization. Without performance currency, you are at random within the organization with a lower likelihood of being a part of the new paradigm.  You cannot afford to get distracted by the ambiguity, lower your productivity and slack on your execution. If you do, you are creating a dynamic that will make you uncompetitive as decision makers are assessing the new players for the new strategy.

2. Understand the new vision and define the key success factors in the new paradigm. Do an assessment of your key strengths and how they align in the “new world”. You must be ready at any time to articulate your understanding of the new vision and how you fit. You must be ready to make a “relevant sale” about your ability to be a value added contributor in this new world.

3. Actively use your network. When the environment is unclear, you must spend time interacting with others. The worse thing that you can do is keep to yourself and stay in a narrow silo. You want to make sure that you are recognized in the environment, so that you can position yourself to be top of mind as people are making personnel decisions. Hiding out will not preserve your position, and in fact, may keep you from finding out about opportunities as they arise.  As you are interacting with others, you may also want to message the kinds of things that you are interested in, you never know who might ultimately end up with decision making authority. Remember if the environment is ambiguous, then the leadership is still trying to figure it out, and you want to be potentially positioned as someone who should be included or given a shot. One of my mother’s favorite sayings used to be, “out of sight, out of mind”, and in an ambiguous environment you do not want to be invisible.

4. Keep a productive and constructive attitude- As leaders are assessing the new players for their team, they are generally looking for someone who has a positive, “can do” attitude. They are not attracted to someone who seems to be resentful of the new change, of the new decisions that are being made, of the new paradigm. You cannot afford to be perceived as someone with a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, because the leadership has decided that it IS broken, and they have endeavored to fix it, so get with the program. If you really do not agree with the changes and you honestly do not think that you can successfully operate within the new paradigm, then you must be true to yourself and search for an environment where you can contribute and do well. Remember when there are massive changes in the environment, everyone is somewhat intimidated, including those in power. Therefore, they want someone who is perceived as solution oriented, constructive, has an appetite for moving ahead and moving forward. If you are perceived as that person, you will come out on top as the ambiguity subsides and the new paradigm is clarified.

Blog for Week January 23, 2012

What if like my current job and I don’t want to move for the next 5 years. How can I communicate that without leading my boss to think that I am not ambitious or assertive?

Congratulations that you are in a job that you love and it works for your life and your lifestyle right now. The operative word is now. In this dynamic world that we are all living in, work environments, managers, leaders, company objectives change quickly and in order to succeed in today’s environment you must be focused on forward growth and comfortable with embracing change.  In fact,  you must actively look for ways to grow and to improve the processes around you. If you endeavor to stay right where you are because today, the hours work for you and your family, the money is comfortable, and you like the person you are working for  you, you will definitely be left behind in 5 years from a skills and experience perspective, and may not be competitive when you are ready to move forward. What if your boss leaves and you are now working with someone who is not supportive and does not appreciate your contributions? Suppose you are eligible for a big promotion because of your seniority and the new role would work even better for your lifestyle, but you are not competitive because you have not been expanding your experiences over the last 5 years. Are you really willing to forego that prospective opportunity to stay in the same seat or 5 years?

It is perfectly fine to communicate that you really enjoy what you are doing now and that you are learning a lot. However, it is also important that you communicate that you are always interested in growing and acquiring new knowledge and skills so that you can continue to contribute to the organization. If the senior people around you perceive that you have no interest in advancing, they will not make the extra effort to invest in you or to use capital on your behalf to help accelerate your career and you will stall in your career. This is particularly important if you are in the middle of your career, for it is at this level that many people stall and then are capped within an organization. If you have been doing what you are doing for 6-7 years, it is REALLY important that you keep a forward and upward posture and be very clear about your intentions to continue to be value add, to grow, and to ascend in the organization. You cannot afford to be perceived as content at your current level. Again, I am saying that is fine to communicate that you enjoy what you do, but you should never leave anyone with the impression that where you are is it for you. Those around you should always perceive that you want to grow, to learn new things, to add skills to your tool chest, for the career game is happening with the backdrop of a fast-paced world where change is happening quickly and if you want to play the game successfully you want to have all of the latest tools and skills with a posture of growth to compete.

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

As I was reflecting on the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, my thoughts kept circling on how an ordinary person can do extraordinary things, which was the central theme of a keynote speech that I gave in January 2011 at an Ecumenical service in Harlem, York honoring Dr. King. I underscored this theme, because I suspect that Dr. King’s parents did not have a vision on January 15, 1929 that their son, their little baby boy, would have the impact on the world that he did. He was at that moment, an ordinary baby, coming into a world filled with injustices and challenges.

I am fairly certain, from all that I have studied about him, that as a high school student, or college student, he did not have a vision that he would walk himself, let alone lead thousands, into unknown territory, execute boycotts and lead marches using unfamiliar tactics and strategies, that had not been used effectively yet in this country. He was in fact an ordinary man, but he had the courage to answer the call, to say yes to the opportunity to make a difference. Yes, he was an ordinary man, who did extraordinary things, because he recognized the gifts that he was given, the gift of oratorical skills, the gift to recognize and build key relationships, the gift to mobilize and energize people to follow him. He recognized whose he was and depended on THE POWER for his direction and his strength. He understood that we could not be great as individuals or as a country, if we did not make it possible for everyone to have a chance at being great.

While you may not have the courage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to face the unknown with the certainty of faith, or to step into situations of known danger, you can be inspired and mobilized by his passion for helping the unfortunate, his passion for universal freedom, his passion and desire for equal opportunity for every man and every woman and  his passion for justice.

You can honor his memory and his passion by doing your part to help someone else, which was the primary driver for all that he did. You might have a large, public platform where you can impact many, many people, or you may be able to do your part by helping a senior cross the street, by spending a few minutes with someone who may need a listening ear, or just giving someone an extra tender touch, hug, or handshake that says,  “ I recognize you and I honor that you are here”. We can all do our part, every day, in small and large ways, to make this world a place where there is equal access and opportunity for all, to make it a better place for someone else, and in the process for ourselves. What a way to pay homage to one who heard and answered The Call from HIM.

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

Happy New Year: Say Goodbye to Your History and Step into Your Destiny

Happy New Year: Say Goodbye to Your History and Step into Your Destiny

What a year 2011 was with all of its lessons and experiences! It was indeed a rich year of lessons learned and a year with a testimony of endurance.

If you are reading this blog, then pat yourself on the back, you endured, you persevered, you walked right into a new year, upright, smarter, more experienced, and more equipped to handle challenges and triumph!!! 

25 Most Powerful Women in Banking

The American Banker released “the ninth annual list. Plus The 25 Women to Watch, The 25 Most Powerful Women in Non-bank Finance, and reports on the women who are changing the face of the industry.”

And, once, again Carla Harris was selected. Harris has continued to prove her worth as a leader in the finance sector, while working  tirelessly in the community.

Congrats, Carla!!

_______

17. Carla Harris
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

If you don’t know the difference between a mentor and a sponsor, you probably don’t know Carla Harris. A renowned speaker on career development, she has counseled countless finance professionals on the road to success. And she knows that of which she speaks. A veteran of Morgan Stanley’s M&A and equity syndicate departments, Harris was plucked in late 2009 to run the emerging manager platform at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. The initiative is intended to advise and nurture women- and minority-owned, long-only asset managers.

“If you have an agenda for your career, it will keep you from making emotional decisions about your career and it will also guide you with respect to the timing of making career moves or changes. Without one, you will be easily distracted by the external economic environment or the internal political environment around you.”

Blog for Week July 20: L-E-A-D-E-R

This is the last in my short reflections on Leadership. In the previous weeks,  I have given you a few short thoughts regarding what I consider to be powerful, authentic leadership:

R is for Responsive and Responsible

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