Carla Harris is a leading speaker on motivation, success, and exceeding expectations. Most recently, she was responsible for increasing client connectivity and penetration to enhance revenue generation across Morgan Stanley as Vice Chairman of Global Wealth Management. She has extensive industry experience in the technology, media, retail, telecommunications, transportation, industrial, and healthcare sectors.

Carla was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the National Women’s Business Council in 2013. She is the author of Strategize to Win, Expect to Win, and Lead To Win, and the creator of “Carla’s Pearls,” the centerpiece of her speeches and television appearances.

She was named to Fortune Magazine’s list of “The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives in Corporate America.” She has also been named to Fortune’s magazine’s “Most Influential List,” US Bankers “Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Finance” in 2009, 2010, and 2011, Black Enterprise’s “Top 75 Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2017, as well as the “Top 75 African Americans on Wall Street.” She was also named to Essence Magazine’s list of “The 50 Women Who are Shaping the World,” Ebony’s list of the “Power 100” and “15 Corporate Women at the Top.” She was chosen as “Woman of the Year” in 2004 by the Harvard Black Men’s Forum and in 2011 by the Yale Black Men’s Forum.

Carla was named to the New Jersey Hall of Fame (2015) and has received the Bert King Award from the Harvard Business School African American Alumni Association, the 2005 Women’s Professional Achievement Award from Harvard University, the Pierre Toussaint Medallion from the Office of Black Ministry of the Archdiocese of New York, the Women of Power Award given by the National Urban League, the Women of Influence Award from The Links, Incorporated, and many other awards.

Carla is a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University and the board of directors of the Walmart Corporation. She was co-chair of the National Social Action Commission of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She is the past chair of the board of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and The Executive Leadership Council, and sits on the boards of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), A Better Chance, Inc., and St. Vincent’s Hospitals.

Carla is a singer and released her third gospel album, “Unceasing Praise” in 2011. Her first CD, titled “Carla’s First Christmas,” was a bestseller on Amazon.com in New York and in record stores, and was featured on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in his “American Dream” segment.

Andreas Phelps is principal and founder of The Collective Potential, a San Francisco-based practice that serves as a catalyst for change in the construction industry. The Collective Potential drives change by enabling: project-based learning, development of high potentials into master integrators, and strategic transformation of organizations focused on Lean delivery and continuous improvement.

He is the author of The Collective Potential: A Holistic Approach to Managing Information Flow in Collaborative Design and Construction Environments. Andreas’ background in construction over the last 19 years is wide and varied. He started his career working with building science, design, construction administration, and failures investigation for exterior cladding systems. This gave him a unique and holistic perspective of how complex systems are designed, constructed, and performed.

This type of integrated systems thinking also served as a basis for his graduate studies, which tied together organizational behavior, management science, and information technology to understand optimized information flow in complex teams. This research served as the foundation for his more recent work with understanding and proactively managing the social, technical, and technological aspects of project teams and organizations to enable greater productivity and innovation.