MEET CARLA
Carla Harris is a renowned international public speaker and is also a Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley. She was most recently the Vice Chairman responsible for increasing client connectivity and penetration to enhance revenue generation across the firm. In her 30+ year career as an investment banker, Ms. Harris has had extensive industry experiences in the technology, media, retail, telecommunications, transportation, industrial, and healthcare sectors. She is highly regarded as a motivator, executor, and leader. In August 2013, Carla Harris was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the National Women’s Business Council.
In early 2024, Carla won the Anthem Award (Diversity Equity, Inclusion Business Leader of the Year Team and Leadership category) for her book Lead to Win and an inaugural Anthem Community Voice Award (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Business Leader of the Year, Team and Leader category). Carla was also recognized as a 2024 Webby Honoree. These outstanding honors further underscores Carla’s position as a leading voice for leadership and championing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.
Carla was named as one of the Top 50 speakers in the world in 2023, and one of the Top 40 female speakers in the world in 2020. Additionally, she is a Crain’s D&I Lifetime Achievement Award winner and Bookfest Award winner for Lead to Win.
Carla engages audiences around the world with her popular “Carla’s Pearls” where she shares with both leaders and emerging leaders how to maximize their career success across all industries using the “hard earned and hard learned” lessons that she acquired during her Wall Street career. Her most recent book, Lead to Win, shares her pearls of Intentional Leadership to help professionals become powerful, impactful, influential leaders into today’s challenging professional context.
Carla has been named to Fortune Magazine’s list of “The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives in Corporate America”, Fortune’s Most Influential List, U. S. Bankers Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Finance, Black Enterprise’s Top 75 Most Powerful Women in Business, and Top 75 African Americans on Wall Street, and to Essence Magazine’s list of “ 50 Women Who are Shaping the World” and Ebony’s list of the Power 100. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Money, Barrons and many other publications.
In her other life, Carla is a singer who has sold out concert at Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theatre, and released 4 Gospel CDs: “O This is Christmas”(2021) “Unceasing Praise” (2011), “Joy Is Waiting”(2005),and her first CD entitled, “Carla’s First Christmas”(2000),was a bestseller on Amazon. com in New York and was featured on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in his “American Dream” segment.