[hacsky]

Donald Kendall started as a worker in a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, but he swiftly climbed the corporate ladder, becoming head of the company’s international division by 1957 when he was only in his mid-30s.

I wonder if that career path is still possible today?

[swatcoder]

Be a standout employee in a rapidly growing and transforming company, stepping into increasingly significant roles as opportunies expand?

Of course. Countless people on this very forum have taken that road and countless so are still doing so today.

But not everyone is able to make their mark as a standout employee, not everyone commits to one organization long enough to see it through (passing up on other opportities), and and not every organization grows or even survives well enough to open those doors to them.

It's common, but neither universal nor guaranteed -- and always has been. While the culture of loyalty (in both directions) has certainly changed over time and likely represents changes in how common, it's a misperception to not notice it still happening every day.

[pyuser583]

The “rapidly growing” part is really important.

[d1sxeyes]

Watch out for survivorship bias here. How many people worked in the bottling plants who did NOT become CEO?

A bit of Fermi maths here: the Pepsi Bottling Group had about 70K employees before it was bought by PepsiCo. Assuming a management/admin/support layer of about 50%, you've got maybe 35K employees directly engaged in bottling. This was only one of a multitude of bottling companies, but let's assume for now that while other bottling companies produce for other companies too there's probably no easy path from supplier to parent company unless the supplier is effectively a subsidiary.

From 1957 to today is 67 years. F&B turnover is around 75%, so we're talking about ~25 000 new employees/year for 67 years, which is around 1.8 million.

When you look at this astronomic career progression as a one-in-two-million event, it seems a bit less implausible.

Now for a bit of a silly tangent: there are around 33 million businesses in the USA now, and around 330 million people, which means around one business for every 10 people. Assuming each one of those companies has a distinct CEO (big assumption here), we'd find around 180 000 CEOs who once worked in a Pepsi bottling plant. It would almost be a surprise if one of those 180 000 was NOT the CEO of Pepsi.

[flak48]

A similar but more recent career trajectory: Elliot Hill, the incoming Nike CEO started at Nike as a store sales intern and was already head of Nike EMEA retail by around age 34 (in the year 2000)

[SoftTalker]

Yes it's possible. You need really good social and political skills, and a somewhat ruthless approach. Sociopathic tendencies, in other words.

[BobbyTables2]

Must require excellent golf skills too.

[arethuza]

The military historian Richard Holmes pointed out in one of his books that at the height of UK imperial power someone managed to rise from private soldier to Field Marshall and Chief of the Imperial General Staff and that apparently today an equivalent rise would be impossible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_William_Robertson,_1st_Bar...

[cafard]

James Gavin made it from private soldier to Lieutenant General from 1924 to 1958.

John Vessey enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard in 1939, and became Chief of Staff of the US Army in 1982.

[psunavy03]

Absolutely untrue, at least in a US context. Michael Boorda rose from the bottom of the enlisted ranks to become Chief of Naval Operations in the 1990s.

[ywvcbk]

> that apparently today an equivalent rise would be impossible

There is still a pathway for enlisted servicemen to become officers in the British army. So technically it should be possible?

[crop_rotation]

That career path is still possible today, but it never was commonplace as the example makes one think.

[Tiktaalik]

I think this sort of thing is still very possible in the Games Industry.

The most accessible job is QA Tester, paid an hourly wage and accessible to anyone really[1]. Anyone that shows themselves to be smart and useful very strongly has an ability to move into Production/Product Management, especially if they're at a smaller studio.

From there, Production is one of those really weirdo jobs where at its lowest rungs you're doing things that no one really wants to do, like taking notes in meetings and filling out Jira tasks, but the top of the Production job chart is Executive Producer or Studio General Manager with substantial sway around the strategic direction of a game or studio and pay to match.

In contrast the Art/Programming paths achieve much higher pay and interesting work at the low end, but also have a lower ceiling in terms of sway and pay.

[1] Anyone that understands what a video game is and plays them of course. Though at this point I'm sure people with some sort of indie game dev experience have an edge in hiring.

[ies7]

IMO most companies under $1B in top 5 population countries treat head of international division just the same with their head of regional.

So 35-40 years old leaders are common.

[gremlinunderway]

I wouldn't put so much stock in these kinds of historic anecdotes about "self-made" or rags-to-riches people. Most of them are rose tinted recollections given by the person themselves in an interview with a journalist writing a puff piece without actual background checking.

It's really easy to hide privilege and connections by leveraging people's bias. For example, this guys' wiki says his parents were "dairy farmers" which immediately evokes some kind of small family subsistence farm. But maybe what it actually was is they owned half a State's worth of mechanized dairy farms and were multi-millionaires who had never milked a cow in their life.

People love to say the same thing about Bill Gates, how he was this rags to riches story even though his family was both well off enough to put him into one of the few high schools in the country to have computers at the time and his mother worked on the Seattle health board and handled IBMs contracts for computing.

Don't put stock into these propaganda pieces.

[tossandthrow]

I think there are areas today, where you can rapidly grow and in 60 years we will look back and think to ourselves how that was possible.

[naming_the_user]

Sure.

It’s just statistically unlikely if you look at random people because, well, there are very few huge companies to climb.

Life is a big old competition.

[mingus88]

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