Upper management in recent years doesn't tend to work that way: the time when an assembly-line worker got promoted up the ranks to Ford CEO is long gone. Instead there's a separate class of professional managers who hop jobs between companies, starting from VP-level jobs at smaller companies and moving up towards C-level jobs at larger companies. Same with universities, where the President is no longer usually just a senior professor. This has corresponded somewhat with the divergence in individual/management salaries, I believe, as it's a completely different class of people rotating between firms, not just a promotion up the ranks.
The advantage of that system is that people are indeed professional managers, not e.g. engineers who got promoted to management. But there are also downsides...