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campuses, the speed with which professors moved up a civil service–type salary ladder reflected the power of their academic department—those in more powerful departments moved up the salary scale more quickly.1 A study of 338 managers who began their career in a 3,500-employee public utility found that the power of the unit where people began their careers affected the rate of salary growth, with people starting in more powerful units moving up more rapidly.2 That study also found that managers who began their careers in higher-powered departments, such as operations, distribution, and customer service, were more likely to remain in high-power units as they changed jobs. Prior to its breakup by the government, the road to the CEO position at AT&T was through the Illinois Bell subsidiary. If you wanted to be CEO at Pacific Gas and Electric, the legal department was the best place to build your career. The shift in power from engineers to lawyers was visible over time: in 1950, only 3 of the company’s most senior positions were occupied by attorneys; by 1980, the comparable number was 18.3 For many years, finance was the route to the top at General Motors.4 At the University of Illinois, where I began my academic career, senior university positions were often filled with people from the physics department.

At Wells Fargo, prior to the merger with Norwest, senior leaders came disproportionately out of the management sciences department. This list included Clyde Ostler, who during his 30-year career was the chief financial officer, head of retail banking, and head of Internet banking; Robert Joss, who rose to become vice chairman of Wells Fargo before going on to be CEO at Westpac Bank in Australia and then dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business; Frank Newman, who also served as CFO at Wells Fargo before going on to run Bankers Trust; and Rod Jacobs, who served as CFO and later as president of Wells Fargo. As the management sciences group provided analysis for many of the bank’s most critical decisions, people in that department had exposure to the bank’s most senior leaders. At the young age of 23, Ostler did analyses for Wells Fargo’s investment committee, whose members included the top six decision makers. Committee members were also part of the bank’s management committee, so Ostler was soon working with that group and sitting in at their meetings. At a very early point in his career, Clyde Ostler had an excellent position within the bank’s communication network, with access to both critical information and key people.

We intuitively know that not all career platforms are equal in value as a path to power, and research supports that intuition. But people often err in choosing where to start building their power base. The most common mistake is to locate in the department dealing with the organization’s current core activity, skill, or product—the unit that is the most powerful at the moment. This turns out to not always be a good idea because the organization’s most central work is where you are going to encounter the most talented competition and also the most well-established career paths and processes. Moreover, what is the most important function or product today may not be in the future. So if you want to move up quickly, go to underexploited niches where you can develop leverage with less resistance and build a power base in activities that are going to be more important in the near future than they are today. The following two examples illustrate this idea in action.

UNEXPECTED PATHS TO POWER

You might think that knowing something about cars would be a good way to rise to the top of an automobile company, or that having a background in software would be important for having a successful career in one of the world’s largest software firms. But you’d be wrong in both cases. And in understanding why, you can gain some important insights into where to launch your career.

By 2009, Zia Yusuf was executive vice president of the Global Ecosystems and Partner Group for SAP, the $15 billion company headquartered