Pepsi’s Soviet Navy (2021)

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.

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)

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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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

How would giving Ukraine nuclear warheads solve anything?

What art are you referring to? I only see photographs that are credited (on mobile)

Do you mean the navy cap with the Pepsi logo? It's credited as an illustration. In 2021 the Text-to-image models also weren't that good yet, or did I miss something?