Each year, our seventh-grade boys and their fathers or father figures gather for a special evening event at school: The Father/Son Book Talk. The evening features a distinguished speaker/author who delivers an inspirational talk related to our school mission or theme. This year’s theme, “excel,” was the perfect fit for our featured speaker, Ms. Carla Harris. Ms. Harris is Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley, where she has managed and executed billions of dollars of equity and equity related transactions, a successful Gospel recording artist who has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater, and a popular public speaker. In 2013, she was appointed by President Obama to chair the National Women’s Business Council. She is also the author of Expect to Win (2009), Strategize to Win (2014) and Lead to Win (2022) . Inspired early in life by her grandmother’s advice to "give her all" to every endeavor, no matter the size, and her father’s loving exhortation to “make sur...