You’ve assembled teams, grown businesses, shouldered vast responsibility. The next question becomes: “What am I building now, and for whom?
Many senior leaders, founders and professionals find themselves facing a “What’s next for me?” moment at the peak of their career
Your “bonus years” are the time to rediscover stimulation, curiosity, and sense of growth, in a way that fits who you are now
“Identity workspaces”, environments that provide the safety, stimulation, and stretch required for renewal, are crucial
When you’re at the peak of your career, time becomes the rarest commodity. Every hour is accounted for, every decision consequential. It’s also the moment when the idea of stepping back to learn, reflect, or reconnect with peers can feel least possible, even indulgent. But that’s precisely when it matters most, and here’s why.
The higher you rise, the more your world narrows around you - a select circle of colleagues, stakeholders, and trusted advisers. You’re surrounded by people who rely on your judgment, but fewer who might challenge it. Your network becomes efficient, but not expansive. Your days are full, but your learning often slows down.
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“The higher you rise, the more your world narrows around you”
That is precisely why the best time to step back, to reflect, to learn, to widen your lens is now, when you are at your peak.
For many senior leaders, founders, and professionals, a moment will arrive when the question shifts. It’s no longer “How do I get to the next level?” It’s “What’s next for me?”
Not in terms of hierarchy or title, but in purpose, impact, and meaning. After years of running fast, building teams, growing businesses, and shouldering responsibility, the question becomes more existential: “What am I building now, and for whom?”
We are living through a profound demographic and cultural shift. As London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott have shown in The 100-Year Life, longer lives mean we no longer move through a single linear sequence of education, work, and retirement. Instead, the new reality is cyclical: alternating periods of work, learning, renewal, and reinvention.
The leaders who thrive across decades are those who treat learning not as a sabbatical, but as part of the work itself, as a way to stay relevant, curious, and alive to what’s next. The most valuable investments we make in midlife are not financial but intangible: our knowledge, vitality, and relationships. They are the assets that compound only if we keep reinvesting.
“The leaders who thrive across decades are those who treat learning as a way to stay relevant, curious, and alive to what’s next”
Unfortunately, those are also the assets most likely to erode in the high-pressure years of peak performance. Research shows that participation in executive education drops sharply in mid-to-late career, not because the appetite for learning fades, but because time disappears. Yet that is precisely when learning delivers the most significant return: when it can be applied directly to real teams, decisions, and markets.
The kind of learning that matters most at this stage is not about acquiring more information. It’s about oneself and about transformation. Leadership transitions are, at heart, identity transitions. We learn who we might become by trying new things.
That’s why when you’ve reached the top of your profession, you no longer need more “content.” You need the right context - a trusted space to explore who you are becoming next. Such “identity workspaces,” environments that provide the safety, stimulation, and stretch required for genuine renewal, are especially crucial at times of transition. In these spaces, experienced leaders can test and experiment with new possibilities - different versions of themselves, future roles, or new kinds of contribution. It’s not about introspection alone; it’s about conversation and experimentation.
What leaders often miss most is not data or frameworks — it’s the room: a space with kindred spirits where they can test ideas, share dilemmas, and challenge assumptions with others who operate at a similar altitude. As research on networks shows, fresh insight rarely comes from one’s inner circle; it arises from the periphery, from peers and thought leaders who see the world differently.
This perspective underpins a forthcoming book, The Bonus Years: Reinventing Our Longer Work Lives, which Herminia is currently writing. It explores a new life stage that has emerged in the past generation — our fifties and sixties — when many people find themselves too young to retire, too restless to stand still, and too experienced to start from scratch.
These bonus years are a windfall – offering decades of vitality and expertise that our parents never imagined. But they also present a challenge. The old scripts no longer fit. Making the most of this period requires new kinds of learning, new communities, and new conversations about identity and purpose.
“In the bonus years, the old scripts no longer fit”
Some people in this phase are founders who have just sold their businesses and are asking what contribution they want to make next. Others are executives planning succession or professionals beginning to think beyond formal retirement. What they share is not a crisis of competence, but a search for renewal. They want to rediscover the stimulation, curiosity, and sense of growth that once defined their earlier careers — but in a way that fits who they are now.
You are. Everyone is. However, time constraints should not dictate whether you invest in yourself, only how much.For senior execurives, the paradox of peak career is that it feels like the worst time to step away, when in fact it is the most strategic. An alumnus of our Senior Executive Programme, the CEO of a major Dutch industrial company that had recently been acquired by a private equity firm, was back on campus this summer. Now in his mid-fifties, he was immersed in an M&A course – together with his CFO. How had he found the time to come back? “I try to do some form of programme every few years. With our new owners we need new ideas, not old,” he said. A few weeks later, a Brazilian executive who manages a global product business, contending with a new world of tariffs, barriers, and tension, said he too was focused on learning. The temptation was to hunker down and focus inward, he explained, but he argued that the essense of his job now was navigating this new paradigm; maintaining bridges across functions, borders, markets, and worldviews. For him, reinvesting in those “navigation skills” more important that ever.
Reinvestment in learning at this stage isn’t about fixing what’s broken; it’s about amplifying what’s possible. It’s about widening the field of view before circumstances narrow it for you.
At LBS, we see this every year: senior leaders who arrive thinking they’re taking a pause from the action, and leave realising they’ve stepped into the next chapter. They rediscover the joy of learning — not as students, but as peers. They reconnect with diverse voices that challenge and inspire. And they begin to imagine new ways to use their experience — in business, philanthropy, education, or entirely new ventures.
The truth is the best time to reinvent yourself isn’t after you step down. It’s while you’re still standing tall, with influence to use, networks to draw on, and energy to invest.
Because at your peak — when everything feels too urgent, too rewarding, and too good to pause — that’s when timing really is everything.
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Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at LBS. John Dore is the Director of LBS’s flagship Senior Executive Programme, and new for 2026, its new Global Executive Programme to be held in Singapore.
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