You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.

This TED Talk features business executive and author Carla Harris, recorded live at TED Women

2018.

It was the spring of 1988 when I had the aha moment. I was at my first roundtable.

And for those of you who don't know, the roundtable was a very commonly used phrase on Wall Street to describe the year-end evaluative process for analysts, associates, vice presidents, all the way up to managing directors. That was the

process where they were discussed behind closed doors around a table, i.e. the round table,

and everyone was put into a category, the top bucket, the middle bucket, the lower bucket,

and then that was translated into a bonus range that would be assigned to each professional.

This was my first time there, and as I observed, I saw that there was one person that was responsible for recording the outcome of a conversation.

There were other people in the room that had the responsibility of presenting the cases of all the candidates.

And there were other invited guests who were supposed to comment as a candidate's position was presented.

It was interesting to me that those other people were folks who were more senior than the folks that were being discussed, and they

theoretically had had some interaction with those candidates. Now, I was really excited to be at this

roundtable for the first time, because I knew that my own process would go through this same way,

and that my bonus would be decided in the same way. So I wanted to know how it worked.

But more importantly, I wanted to understand how this concept of a meritocracy

that every company that I talked to walking out of business school was selling.

Every time I talked to a company, they would say our culture, our process is a meritocracy. The way you get ahead in this organization is that you're smart, you put your head down,

and you work really hard, and you'll go right to the top.

So here was my opportunity to see exactly how that worked.

So as the process began, I heard the recorder called the first person's name.

Joe Smith, the person responsible for presenting Joe's case, did just that.

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