In April 2020, Greg Hahn lost his job. He had spent 15 years at BBDO New York, one of the most decorated creative departments in the business, and the pandemic had just emptied every office in Manhattan. Clients were freezing budgets. Nobody sensible was starting anything.

Two months later, Hahn started an agency.

He partnered with No Fixed Address, a Canadian independent, and opened its first U.S. outpost under the name Mischief. He told Creative Salon later that being let go had taught him something about the job he’d thought was secure: "getting let go made me realise how little control we all have in those situations." He wanted the new place to be "more offence than defence."

Five years and eight months after the layoff, Adweek named Mischief its 2025 U.S. Agency of the Year. By then its work was collecting top Effie and WARC effectiveness honors, and one campaign for Coors Light had reportedly moved 1.8 million cases of beer. The career move that looked like a desperate improvisation in the spring of 2020 turned out to be the strongest move he could have made.

Stories like this get told as luck. Some of it is. But the research on how careers actually move suggests something more useful. The step that looks sideways, or down, is often the one that sets up the step up.

What the personnel files show

Matthew Bidwell of Wharton and J.R. Keller of Cornell worked through eight years of personnel records from a large U.S. healthcare company. They tracked who moved where and what happened next. Their study, published in Management Science in 2025, compared employees who made lateral moves inside the company with matched colleagues who stayed put.

The people who stepped sideways were more likely to be promoted later. They also had substantially higher pay growth.

Those moves were not made by the stars. Lateral movers tended to have been in their jobs longer and to have lower performance ratings than the colleagues who got promoted directly. On paper, they looked like people who had stalled. The authors’ summary is blunt: "people who step sideways in organizations are more likely to subsequently step up."

An earlier study by Michael Waldman of Cornell and Xin Jin of the University of South Florida offered a reason. Senior jobs, they argued, draw on "a wide but not necessarily deep set of skills." A lateral move costs something in the short run. It also builds the range that the bigger job will later demand.

That is the economist’s version. Inside a creative business, the same pattern tends to look like someone volunteering for the account nobody else wanted.

The assignment with no line outside the door

There is a well-known version of this story from a Portland agency in the late 1990s. A young copywriter was hired onto a software account the agency found hard to please. His boss called it a trap. Everyone around him seemed to think he was making a mistake. Half a year after he moved to the Portland office, the software company took its business elsewhere. Now he had no account at all, in a building where nearly every ambitious creative was angling for the same famous sportswear client.

So he volunteered for the rest. First came a soft drink account his colleagues had more or less given up on. Later came a men’s grooming brand with a dusty reputation and few volunteers. The grooming relationship ran for close to a decade, made the brand the top-selling men’s body wash in America, and won more than 100 awards along the way. The copywriter eventually ran the agency’s global creative network. Years later he talked through the pitch that pulled that grooming brand back from disaster and why the simplest version of an idea usually wins.

What the unpopular assignment offered was not glamour. It was room. A brand nobody is fighting over gets less scrutiny from above and less competition from inside. The person working on it gets more decisions and fewer committees. If the work is good, it is unambiguously theirs. On the account everyone wanted, the same person would have been the fourth name on someone else’s campaign.

Leaving the title before the title leaves you

The pattern runs in the other direction too. Sometimes the move that looks wrong is walking away from the bigger job.

On November 17, 2025, Campaign reported that Alex Lubar was leaving his post as global CEO of DDB Worldwide. He had joined the network in 2022 and been promoted to its top job in October 2023. His next role was chief executive of Fundamentalco, a brand strategy consultancy spun out of Blackstone in 2024, with clients that Storyboard18 listed as including Bain Capital, Visa, Hilton and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In headcount and name recognition, it was a fraction of what he was leaving. Campaign reported that the role would not be filled.

Within two weeks, Omnicom had closed its acquisition of Interpublic and announced that DDB would be retired in the first half of 2026. The global CEO title Lubar gave up stopped meaning much the moment the memo went out.

Nobody outside the room can say how much Lubar knew, or whether Fundamentalco will grow into something large. That isn’t the point. On the day he announced it, the move read as a step down from one of the most famous names in advertising to a consultancy most people in the industry hadn’t heard of. A few weeks later it read as getting out ahead of a decision he couldn’t have controlled.

Why the wrong-looking choice keeps winning

The obvious path is crowded. Every ambitious creative in that Portland building wanted the same account. Every network executive wants the global title. Crowded paths reward people who are already ahead, and they leave little room to show anything new. The unpopular assignment, the small shop, the lateral move: each one trades status for a shorter line.

The wrong-looking move also tends to hand over more control. Hahn’s remark about decisions made "in rooms you’re not allowed into" is the clearest statement of it. A large organization can erase your job, your brand or your client with one announcement. A smaller one, or a neglected corner of a large one, gives you more say over what happens next.

And the move builds range. Bidwell and Keller’s lateral movers were, in effect, collecting the breadth that senior jobs require. The copywriter who worked on a tech client, a soda brand and a body wash learned more about selling things to different people than one who spent the same years on a single prestige account.

The survivorship problem

None of this means every move that looks like a mistake is secretly brilliant. Plenty of people take the job nobody wanted and discover why nobody wanted it. Plenty of independent agencies founded in 2020 no longer exist. The stories that get told are the ones that worked, and that skews the sample.

The Bidwell and Keller result is useful because it isn’t a collection of success stories. It is a full set of personnel records, including the people whose sideways moves led nowhere. On average, the sideways move still came out ahead.

The Waldman and Jin study adds a caution that tends to get left out of the career-advice version. Lateral moves carry a real short-term cost. The worker gives up time in a role where they are already productive, and the payoff only arrives if the new skills raise what they can do later. The researchers also found that the most highly educated workers were the least likely to be moved sideways, because the up-front cost of moving them was higher. People with the most invested in a single track are the ones least likely to leave it, which is part of why the track gets crowded.

That gives a practical test for any move that looks wrong. Ask what it costs right now, in title, money or visibility, and be specific. Then ask what it buys that the obvious option can’t: a decision that would otherwise belong to someone else, a client no one is watching, a skill the current job will never require. If the second list is short, the move probably looks wrong because it is. If the second list is long, the cost is the price of the shorter line.

That average is the honest version of the advice. A move that looks wrong is not a guarantee. It is a bet with better odds than its reputation suggests, especially when it buys three things the obvious move doesn’t: more room, more control and more range.

Hahn didn’t plan to start an agency in a pandemic. What he did with the opening is the part anyone can copy. The crowded path always looks safest from inside the crowd.