Industry Trends: Fascinating Rhythms in the Career Paths of Hospitality Executives

We explored the idea that the timing of executives' career moves was consistent with Bak's notion of self-organized criticality. Consistent with predictions, time series analysis of job changes for 43 hospitality executives obeyed a power law and revealed a mixture of predictable and unpredictable patterns with a musical nature (pink noise distribution). The data showed better fit for traditional 'organization men' versus opportunistic 'trailblazers.' These differences in career patterns (rhythms) could be used to reliably distinguish between these two executive-types using neural nets. Potential implications for executive coaching and development are discussed.