from Fast Company, November 1998

Hypothesis: The shortest distance between where you are and where you want to go is a straight line.

Subject: Brenda Williams, 41, a founding partner of the Lab, a Chicago-based subsidiary of advertising giant Leo Burnett Co. The venture is an eclectic, problem-solving "laboratory" where companies such as Walt Disney World Corp., Kellogg's, and McDonald's thrash out creative approaches to name-branding and strategizing, with help from futurists, artists, anthropologists, and other unlikely marketing consultants.

Career DNA: Williams has built her career by making unconventional ( some might say "wrongheaded" ) choices. First she gave up a promising job as a medical assistant with a group practice in Denver, Colorado, because the world of sutures and shots was just too darn conventional. "There's only one way to practice medicine, and that's the right way," says Williams. "If you experiment, you'll kill someone." To stave off boredom, she took a job as an arts coordinator for the Denver public-school system while she worked her way to a second degree - in communications and psychology - at the University of Colorado.

She graduated in 1984 and moved to Atlanta - without a job and without a place to live - after falling in love with the city during a New Year's Eve visit. "Atlanta seemed like it was still evolving," she recalls. "Unlike New York, it wasn't cooked yet. I felt that I was still under construction - and so was Atlanta." She lucked into a job as a researcher for McKinsey & Co., where she discovered that she had an aptitude for business strategizing. In 1986, she jumped from consulting to advertising, taking a market-research position in Chicago at Leo Burnett Co. One year later, Burnett tapped her to launch the Lab.

Observation: A mentor at McKinsey had told Williams that if she wanted to be a consultant to the inner sanctums of blue-chip companies, she'd better earn an MBA. So when she moved to Chicago, her original game plan was to pursue studies part-time at the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University.

A year later, she had to make the choice of a lifetime: She got an offer to launch what was then called the Idea Lab, a service that would help Burnett's advertising clients to brainstorm new products. By then, she had gotten married and had given birth to twins, and the demands of part-time business classes - added to a full-time job and motherhood - were just too much to handle.

Should Williams pass up the offer at Burnett and transfer to Kellogg full-time to finish her degree? Or should she drop out of business school and give up a clear shot at the consulting job of her dreams? "I decided to stop looking at my career priorities and to start deciding on my life priorities," Williams says. "I took a hard look at whether graduate studies would help with the things in my life that I really value. And I decided that they wouldn't. So I figured, 'Enough already.' "

Results: In the end, Williams charted a different map for getting ahead. While her colleagues dutifully followed the main road through school, she took a detour through the Lab - which got her where she wanted to go in less time.

Williams made a name for herself and the Lab by bringing unusual tactics to the table. When a client was struggling to come up with products for its Gen-X market, she took the executive team on a tour of Chicago's twentysomething nightlife, capped with a midnight visit to a grunge bar. "Traditional management consultancies are very fact-based and process-oriented," Williams says. "At the Lab, we rely on instinct and intuition - skills that they really can't teach you in B-school."

Conclusion: Sometimes the best career path is the path less traveled. "Getting an MBA wasn't about me or about what I wanted; it was about what the world was telling me I had to do. I decided to find another way - my way."