Leadership Spotlight

Wharton's Peter Cappelli recounts the history of executive careers and the creation of the fast track

The students are asked to write about their last job and how they were managed, and inevitably, people talk about why they left," says Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Human Resources. "And many students began to report that they were in jobs that literally ended, and not just junior analyst positions in investment banking. In consulting and even some corporations, after three years or so, they are told to leave. Some people in partnerships were told that no one is eligible for partner promotion. In flat organizations, they are saying that beyond five years, they cannot see the next job up the hierarchy that could be open for them."

"They don't see a way to build a career, to advance," says Cappelli. "And these are fast-track people."

There's little doubt that the traditional employment system of secure, lifetime jobs with predictable advancement and stable pay is, by most accounts, dead. How, then, do aspiring business leaders scratch their way up the corporate climbing wall? Cappelli hopes his latest project, a book he's writing called The Path to the Top, will offer some answers.

In this first of two interviews, we talk to Cappelli about the past, looking at the early history of executive careers in the U. S. Our second interview, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Wharton Alumni Magazine, will examine recent history and the future. "It wasn't very satisfying, after my first book, to simply say what was no longer happening, "Cappelli says of the 1999 book The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market Driven Workforce. "It seemed to me that there is a story about how careers are evolving and that it makes sense to look at how we got here. The ultimate goal of the book, of course, is to come up with a new model-to show what careers are looking like now. There are a lot of things we know about the way careers worked in the past—about how pay was set, what determined advancement, etc. I'd like to be able to do the same thing for careers now. But initially, at least, I believe there's something to be learned from the past."