The Bonus Years: Your Next Chapter in Life and Work
About this ebook
Increased longevity has gifted us fifteen-to-twenty extra active, healthy working years, shattering the traditional linear career script of learning, working, and retiring. In The Bonus Years, the world's leading expert on career transition, and London Business School Professor Herminia Ibarra, delivers the definitive, social-science-backed resource for navigating later-career transformation.
Ibarra reveals that thriving in an extended work life requires abandoning the old linear, plan-and-implement strategies. Instead, successful reinvention comes through ‘resourceful discovery’ - a disciplined process of active experimentation, trying on new futures, and knowing when to adjust your course.
Whether change has arrived uninvited through an industry shock, or a quiet internal restlessness is telling you it's time to let go, this book provides the actionable tools to build transition mastery and successfully map your path forward.
Filled with rich and varied case studies of professionals who reinvented themselves across the globe, The Bonus Years is an empowering manifesto for anyone who refuses to stand still. It is proof that to bloom late is not to bloom less - it is to bloom with deeper roots, on your own terms.
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About the author
Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior and Governor of London Business School. She formerly served as Professor on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties. An authority on leadership and career transition, Thinkers50 ranks her among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, a Fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar Practitioner Award.
Ibarra is the author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity. She writes regularly for publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. She has an engaged social media presence on LinkedIn and X series and undertakes frequent speaking engagements.
