That's a great transition, congrats to the author. My wife's mother also went from a secretary to the COO of a multi-billion dollar real estate company. Simil

That's a great transition, congrats to the author. My wife's mother also went from a secretary to the COO of a multi-billion dollar real estate company. Similarly, the current CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns, was an executive assistant at Xerox. Although rare, it seems like things like that happened a lot more often before than now. I'm not sure if it means that as a society we have more opportunity or that we are more pigeonholed in our careers. Maybe it's the free-agent nature of our employment these days, but I don't picture execute assistants these days ever getting the opportunity of jumping into something completely different and rising to the rank of C-level.