From my experience, I agree. Getting to VP or SVP in a Fortune 500 (or even middle-market) requires proven performance...Especially in P&L "line jobs" like sales, business development, and M&A. To go from there to C-Suite requires guile and vicious politics. Staying in a C-Suite means being good and dirty politics. With staff jobs like HR, you have to be ruthless at politics from the start.
I was VP of Strategic Development for a multi-$BB diagnostic company. I had a big win on an M&A deal that the CFO said could never happen. I was called in by the CEO (a Cornell MD and NYU MBA) and she screamed at me about something she said I had emailed the CFO. I asked to see the email. The CFO had edited my original email, the little fu@k! I walked straight out of the CEO's office, back into mine, and printed the original email. She was blown away. That's the type of dirty dealings that happen at the top. How many times had he done that that nobody discovered. Two years later when I left to start my own M&A firm, he was STILL the CFO
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Craig T
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