Welcome to Edition #75 of Did You Know? (DYK), the weekly newsletter by Gorick Ng, Harvard career adviser and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of The Unspoken Rules, where we deconstruct the untold story of how someone (or something) became successful—and what you can do to follow in their footsteps.
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Did You Know? Go deep + broad!
→ Read time: 7 min
Your story this week
Did you know? Mary Barra held 13 roles at the Fortune 500 company General Motors before becoming its CEO.
I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn (perhaps too much for my own good). Recently, I found myself coming across more and more profiles that made me go:
“Wait… is every high school student now the CEO of something?!”
A few Google searches later, I realized that I’m not the only one with this observation. I mean, check out these Reddit threads:
With the “CEO” title (with or without the word “Founder”) seemingly becoming more common by the day, it can be easy to feel like you’re in the minority if you’re somehow not a CEO or Founder—especially if you doomscroll on LinkedIn as much as I do.
I haven’t just seen this phenomenon online. I’ve also seen it in person with my students at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and beyond. In fact, just last semester, I remember looking at a student’s resume, seeing “CEO,” and asking what it was about.
This student’s response?
“My friends and I built this tool in a CS class. We applied to Y Combinator and got rejected, so we’re not doing it anymore… but I was CEO…”
Don’t get me wrong. Side projects are great (just ask Nike). It’s important to learn how to rebound from rejection (just ask U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor). It’s also okay to change your mind (just ask actor Denzel Washington).
But, in a world where it seems like everyone and their cat is “CEO and Founder” of something, it’s just as important to not be too spellbound by titles. After all, anyone can call themselves anything!
(This isn’t just the case for “CEO,” by the way. I know many students who want to become “management consultants” so badly that they’ll literally only apply for jobs with “consulting” in the title regardless of what the job actually is or whether the company is even reputable.)
But here’s the thing about job titles: titles aren’t careers.
You can’t just call yourself something and have it be true. You need to spend time building 3 things:
- Human capital: What you know and can do (i.e., your skills and knowledge)
- Social capital: Who you know (i.e., your networks)
- Reputational capital: Who knows you and what they know you for (i.e., your brand)
(I have a term for this: “The Ten Year Rule” and you can tap here to see how it applies to U.S. President Joe Biden and YouTuber MrBeast.)
Now that we know how to become CEO by title alone (just update your title on LinkedIn!), let’s now talk about how to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Introducing: Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors (GM), who was just named by Fortune magazine as the No. 1 Most Powerful Woman.
If we hop on her LinkedIn, this is what we see:
Barra has 13 experiences listed.
The commonality between all 13?
Every single one was at General Motors—where she is CEO today.
Here’s an overview of her timeline:
1980, Co-op Intern
Barra starts her co-op program at Pontiac Motors, a subsidiary of GM, where she rotates through company functions from product development to powertrain (e.g., engines). She finds that the plant floor is her favorite place with its “real-time demands and very visible results.”
Time until next role: 5 years
1985, Senior Plant Engineer
Barra graduates college with a degree in Electrical Engineering. She immediately joins GM as a senior plant engineer. 3 years in, Barra receives a scholarship from GM to attend the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Time until next role: 5 years
1990, Senior Staff Engineer
Barra earns her MBA from Stanford. GM promotes her to senior staff engineer, where she oversees company-wide engineering initiatives.
Time until next role: 3 years
1993, Manager, Manufacturing Engineering
Barra becomes manager of manufacturing planning for midsize cars.
Time until next role: 3 years
1996, Manager, Manufacturing Engineering
Barra pivots into the executive office as the executive assistant to the chairman, a role that puts her face to face with the highest level decision makers (as Ursula Burns did).
Time until next role: 3 years
1999, General Director, Internal Communications
This role puts Barra in the Corporate Staffs division.
Time until next role: 2 years
2001, Executive Director, Competitive Operations Engineering
This role puts Barra into Vehicle Operations.
Time until next role: 2 years
2003, Plant Manager
Barra goes to the Detroit Hamtramck Assembly—the same type of work that she fell in love with as an intern.
Time until next role: 1 year
2004, Executive Director — Vehicle Manufacturing Engineering
Barra reaches her first Executive role. It’s also the first role that has a substantial description on Barra’s LinkedIn profile. The third notable factor? She stays there for four years.
Time until next role: 4 years
2008, Vice President — Global Manufacturing Engineering
Barra lands her first VP role.
Time until next role: 1 year
2009, Vice President — Global Human Resources
Barra’s second VP role takes her out of engineering and into talent management and development.
Time until next role: 2 years
2011, Senior Vice President — Global Product Development
This time, Barra dives into Design, Program Management, and Quality in addition to Engineering.
Time until next role: 2 years
2013, Executive Vice President — Global Product Development
Barra advances to the next step up from her former role.
Time until next role: 1 year
2014, Chief Executive Officer
Barra becomes the CEO of General Motors.
Time until next role: 2 years
2016, Chief Executive Officer and Chair
Barra leads not only GM but also the Board of Directors.
Time of current role: 8 years, 10 months
Total time elapsed since 1980: 34 years, 10 months
That was a lot of detail! Let’s zoom out. What do you see?
I noticed 2 things: (1) She continuously went deep. (2) She consistently went broad.
(1) Barra went deep by picking a domain (automobiles) and sticking with it.
- We can presume that by staying in one industry, Barra was able to continuously build domain expertise (corporate speak for “knowledge in a specific area”), relationships, and contacts. In other words, she built her human, social, and reputational capital.
(2) She went broad by seeing every function in that domain.
- We can presume that by seeing every function in the company in 1-4 year stints, Barra was able to consistently build her portfolio—and, in doing so, be able to tell the Board of Directors who would eventually hire her that she doesn’t just understand powertrains—she understands how every piece of the company fits together.
Imagine you’re on the board of directors picking the next CEO. Who would you pick? Someone who put CEO on their resume overnight or someone who has consistently gone deep and gone broad?
Now imagine you’re a recruiter picking your next hire. Who would you pick?
What does this mean for you? The next time you come across someone your age or tenure who calls themselves “CEO” (or anything that fills you up with envy), remember Mary Barra—and remember that it takes more than just a title.
Your strategy this week
Did you know? Go deep + go broad!
Don’t worry: Reddit isn’t my only source of information. While Googling, I learned that “job title inflation” is a long-standing phenomenon. In fact, The Financial Times even wrote about it in 1993.
20 years later, Insider covered the topic again—and argued that companies are to blame for job title inflation because companies want to…
- “Screw employees out of overtime wages” (since workers won’t get overtime if they’re salaried ‘managers’)
- “Recruit and retaining professionals” (since it’s free to put a nice title on a job that may otherwise attract fewer candidates)
- “Make junior and midlevel staff seem more important to external clients” (so blame the customer)
- “Satisfy the expectations of Gen Z” (since younger members of the workforce believe that promotions happen more quickly and frequently than older members of the workforce)
Let’s specifically take a look at (4). My hypothesis? Millennials and Gen Z don’t realize that behind every overnight success is a decade of invisible work that’s not flashy enough for social media.
This includes tech startups, by the way! Think you’ll build the next ChatGPT? You might! But Google for “OpenAI founding year” and you’ll see that it started in 2015—9 years ago. (This is after many members of the founding team had already spent a decade-plus pursuing PhDs in computer science.)
So, how do you separate the “hollow title” from the real deal?
Try filling in these blanks:
(1) “I am most envious of _______ who has the title of _______.”
- E.g., “I am most envious of my friend Jack who is the CEO of his own video production company.”
(2) “When I dig into what _______ has actually done, I’m convinced they’re [the real deal / nothing more than a hollow title] because _______.”
- E.g., “When I dig into what Jack has actually done, I’m convinced he's the real deal because he doesn’t just have a bunch of client logos on his website (which anyone can put) and when I look at his portfolio, he’s actually produced real commercials and documentaries for these companies.”
I know it because I’ve experienced it: Before writing The Unspoken Rules, I tried my hand at a number of startups—and, yes, admittedly got a bit carried away with the CEO title myself. I registered domains, incorporated a legal entity, created Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) before I was willing to share my ideas with anyone. I was even on the verge of buying business cards.
The result? I must have now spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to shut that hollow shell of nothingness down—hundreds of dollars more than I actually generated in revenue (which was exactly $0).
Go deep + broad!
Gorick
You may also like:
> What the former CEO of Burberry can teach us about building a good reputation
> What the CEO of Walmart can teach us about working your way to the top
> What the first Black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company can teach us about being seen and heard
> How Sallie Krawcheck led 4 Wall Street businesses in 10 years
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