The New Road to the Top

By Peter Cappelli and Monika Hamori

Today’s top managers of Fortune 100 companies are fundamentally different from the past 20 years. American executives tended to be model organization men who stuck faithfully with the companies that first hired them. But now, they are younger, more of them are female, and fewer of them were educated at elite institutions. They reached the top faster and fewer jobs along the way.

Executives are moving up faster than they did once. Today’s career ladder seems to have fewer rungs, this trend is consistent with the wire spread perception that corporate hierarchies and flattening. The percentages of the top and middle position declined, while the percentage in lower position expanded substantially.

One of significant reasons is executives are much more likely to be promoted in the firms with high growth rates than stagnating companies. And younger firms offer faster advancement, perhaps because of their tendency to have flatter hierarchies but those opportunities come with uncertainty of your career derailed by reorganization.

Another set of lessons concerns on an individual’s advancement to the top