Damola Adamolekun assumed the CEO role at Red Lobster in August, mere months after the seafood chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In September, the company announced it would be exiting bankruptcy under Adamolekun’s stewardship. Before joining Red Lobster, he served as CEO of P.F. Chang’s from 2020 to 2023, leading the Asian-inspired food chain through the pandemic and revitalizing a once-struggling brand. But what’s most striking about Adamolekun’s curriculum vitae is not his two successive corner office posts but rather his extraordinary feat of having led two major restaurant chains by the age of 35.
Adamolekun is what one would call a “CEO sprinter,” one of a rarefied cohort of executives who take less than the roughly 24-year average to move from entry-level to the corner suite. What separates these sprinters from the average executive are three main career catapults, says Elena Lytkina Botelho, a partner at management consulting firm ghSmart and leader of its CEO Genome Project. Botelho and her coresearchers analyzed data from 17,000 C-suite executives to examine their career trajectories over 10 years. Together, they identified three career accelerators—or “catapults”—that help professionals fast-track their ascent to the corner office: taking a demotion or pay cut to expand the scope of their responsibilities; making a bold leap within the first decade of their career; and stepping into and successfully resolving a significant mess.
