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 For the longest time all Pamela G. Carlton wanted to be was a hairdresser.
But styling hair was not what Al and Mildred Carlton had in mind
for their oldest daughter.
They intended for her to be a lawyer, so she diligently obliged,
but after just a year in practice, she grew weary of the profession.
One rainy, lonely all-nighter after ruining a beautiful pair of
green high heel pumps sloshing to a late dinner with a senior associate,
she returned to the office to resume work on a 100-page trust indenture
for the Government of Sweden debt deal. At 2 AM in 1980 before
desktop computers, she was cutting and pasting this document when
she realized she’d made her first career mistake. “I
had done a very good job of following a dream—my parent’s
dream.”
It wasn’t until 2003 after a dazzlingly successful run in
the investment banking arena that Carlton discovered her own dream—creating
an organization to mentor and coach young and mid-level professionals
to become early influential and broad-based leaders in their organizations,
and to get companies to expand their definition of leadership.
To that end she co-founded Springboard—Partners in Cross
Cultural Leadership with Kim Davis (now the President of the JPMorganChase
Foundation). It works with many Fortune 500 companies, hospital
systems and soon an international relief agency to build cross
cultural leadership into the culture of their organizations.
Carlton grew up in the industrial Midwest: Cleveland, Detroit
and Chicago in the Motown era, though she remembers Detroit more
for the 1967 race riots than for the Temptations or Supremes. She
recalls the National Guard in military vehicles rolling down her
middle class, leafy neighborhood with machine guns out their windows.
In 1969, her dad, the top agent for the Equitable Life Assurance
Society of America, got a promotion, and they moved to Highland
Park, a predominantly Jewish area in Chicago with few other black
kids in the school.
Carlton graduated 17th in the class and went to Williams College
(where she graduated #11 out of a class of 500. Her sister went
to M.I.T and is a doctor and Associate Medical Director for Kaiser
Permanente in Atlanta.) At Williams, Carlton seized many leadership
opportunities. As a senior she was President of Phi Beta Kappa
and VP of the College Council. She was a student rep on the college
board and joined it after graduation. A fellow board member, James
Linen, President of Time, Inc., introduced her to Charles J. Hamilton,
Jr., a lawyer at the Pillsbury firm. They married four years later—26
years ago. Their two sons, Sam and Chas Hamilton, attend Harvard.
At Yale Law School Carlton decided to do a joint degree with Yale
School of Management and earned JD and MBA degrees. She had intended
to practice corporate law, but became interested in business, specifically
investment banking. She wanted to do the million—if not billion— dollar
deals. After 18 months at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton,
she joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banker and stayed for
14 years.
The first few she spent in overdrive: while she was practicing
law, new and more complex financial instruments had been developed,
and derivatives had burst on the scene. Facing a daunting new learning
curve, Carlton got down to some serious on-the-job training, volunteering
for every transaction that came her way for the experience. One
of her first deals was a debt financing for U.S. Steel’s
(now USX Corp.) rolled pipe facility in Alabama, the first fully
computerized steel pipe plant in the U.S. It helped to stave off
competition from the Japanese and Taiwanese steel industries for
another decade. A very gratifying deal was for financing Genetic
Systems’ research that led to a diagnostic test for the HIV
AIDS virus in the blood supply, enabling people to give and get
blood without fear. “Who would have thought that an investment
bank could literally save lives?” says Carlton. “If
this research had come just a year earlier, it could have saved
Arthur Ashe’s life. Here I experienced the impact that business
can make on people’s lives.”
Among other financings Carlton has worked on are the New York
Public Library, the State of Michigan, hotels in Florida, casinos
in Nevada, freight cars in Illinois, Swedish Banks, and even her
own investment bank, Morgan Stanley. She has managed teams in Mexico,
Brazil, London and Italy and has run global organizations, traveling
back and forth to Japan, Singapore and Honk Kong. In 2000, she
made nine business trips overseas. Her husband, a partner at Paul,
Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, shared parenting, “not 50/50
partners, since children can still fall between those cracks, but
instead 100%/100% partners so there were no cracks,” she
says. Her parents had set that pattern: her mom, an elementary
school teacher, and dad, an agent at Equitable for 30 years, had
insisted on hard work, leadership and giving back—and the
benefit of making mistakes. Fear of doing so, says Carlton, keeps
people from trying things that appear challenging or hard. Still
today, her 80- and 81-year-old parents ask her what she has done
lately to make them proud of her. (Later, mentor John Mack, Chairman/CEO
of Morgan Stanley and chair of the New York Hospital Board where
she is a Trustee, has consistently modeled cross-cultural leadership
and shown his interest in and openness to people and ideas which
were different than his own).
In 2002, while running an equity research business at JPMorganChase
and institutionalizing the so-called Chinese Wall separating research
analysts from investment bankers, something caught her attention.
As one of very few African American women in her field and the
senior one at her firm, she felt a responsibility to mentor and
coach younger colleagues. She hosted a dinner for the 30 or so
mid-level black women (of a total population of over 2000) and
discovered that within a year, 25 had left the industry. Carlton’s
autopsy revealed that the women had either failed to create networks
for themselves that would insure they got on the right track and
could have protected them in the post-dotcom downsizing, or the
investment bank had failed to nurture them. At that moment she
discovered her purpose.
 From
the start she put her money on the line. She raised $2 million
to start the Leadership Institute for Professional Women of Color
at Spelman College in
2003, and served as their first Co-Executive Director. In 2004,
Springboard launched the Leadership Seminar Series for Professional
Women of Color and continued the series at the Harvard Club in
New York in 2005. They recently expanded the seminar to include
all professionals. Carlton is used to working 12- to 14-hour days,
six or seven days a week. With her own company, she says she’s
even more driven.
Working hard is not enough, she says, unless you’re working
smart. Early on, she admits, she wasn’t. For the first 10
years of her career, she kept her head down, working hard but not
reaching out to make allies or build relationships that could have
helped her forge ahead. “Business is a relationship game;
the quality of one’s life is directly proportional to the
quality of one’s relationships.” Knowing how to build
relationships is not automatic, says Carlton, who says she realized
only after she left Morgan Stanley that she didn’t know anyone! “When
the time came to call on my networks and get support from my associates,
I realized I hadn’t forged those alliances.” In the
next year she went to work building those ties and vowed never
to let them slip, even though networking and relationship building
takes a lot of time.
Carlton is aglow with how interesting working on her two- year-old
company is and is plotting how to make it bigger and more successful,
to expand the perception of leadership in America to be more inclusive. “I
aim to be at the forefront of redefining leadership in this country,” she
says. Springboard is developing corporate training materials and
other tools to expand the concept of leadership.
She confesses amazement at finding herself in a sale and business-development
mode, from a career in execution of corporate finance. She never
had responsibility for new business or raising capital or institutional
sales and never thought she had a personality for it. “But
I’ve discovered that actually, I do—so I’m learning
new tricks.” And that is another part of the secret puzzle
of a happy career. “You can’t make it staying in one
comfortable place,” says Carlton. “I realize that 70%
of what we are selling today will be obsolete in three years. The
trick is to keep ahead of the curve so you’re always testing
new ideas and products and rolling them forward.”
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