4-Quarter Lives

What if the most valuable thing you can become is... undefinable? In the first episode of the Longer Lives Need Better Maps summer series, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Charlie Rogers, founder of the Undefinable Community and author of Undefinable Life Design . Together they explore why younger generations are rejecting traditional career paths—and why their search for identity mirrors the ques...

After twelve weeks exploring what it means to live longer, this summary steps back from individual conversations to examine the bigger picture. Rather than recapping each episode, Avivah looks at the entire series from above and asks a more fundamental question: if the emergence of a new third quarter of life is such a profound shift, why do we still understand it so poorly? The answer, she argues...

This week on 4 Quarter Lives , we revisit Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Sebastian Kernbach , founder of the University of St. Gallen’s Next – Design Your Future initiative — the first university-based midlife programme in continental Europe. They discuss how St. Gallen’s approach blends design thinking, positive psychology and behavioural economics to help accomplished professionals re...

This week, on 4-Quarter Lives, we revisit the conversation between Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Dr Mileham Hayes, author of ‘Live Longer: Revealing Today’s Secrets of Longevity and Wellbeing’ and a specialist in preventative medicine. As he says, “preventive medicine has never realized its promise or potential...until now”. Mileham, who launched the world’s first longevity clinic and has spent nearly...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jennifer Petriglieri, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD Business School and author of Couples That Work , to explore how longer lives are reshaping modern coupledom, careers, and power dynamics inside relationships. Jennifer argues that living and working longer removes the pressure to “have it all at once” an...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, we republish Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Michael Fossat, head of Schneider Electric’s Future Ready program and Director of HR at Schneider Electric France. With a 180-year history, Schneider is now focused on assisting and driving the energy transition to an electric and digital future. Yet this 150,000 strong company discovered that employees over the...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, we republish Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Michael Fossat, head of Schneider Electric’s Future Ready program and Director of HR at Schneider Electric France. With a 180-year history, Schneider is now focused on assisting and driving the energy transition to an electric and digital future. Yet this 150,000 strong company discovered that employees over the...

In this episode of 4-Quarter Lives, we re-visit a conversation between Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Helen Tupper, Chief Executive of Amazing If, a company redefining careers for individuals and companies. Together they explore the intricacies of career transitions during midlife and how organizations can support these changes. The conversation also delves into personal experience, highlighting the es...

This week we revisit a conversation between Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alistair McQueen, Head of Savings and Retirement at Aviva, the UK’s largest general insurance company and a major life and pensions provider. Aviva also has a significant presence in Canada and Ireland. Alistair leads Aviva’s pensions business, helping six million people save for and live in retirement, as well as representing A...

This week, we republish a conversation between Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Chip Conley, the Founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy. Chip Conley is on a midlife mission. After disrupting the hospitality industry twice, first as the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the second-largest operator of boutique hotels in the U.S., and then as Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, leadin...

In this episode of the Four Quarter Lives podcast, we revisit a conversation between Avivah Wittenberg Cox and Professor Herminia Ibarra of the London Business School. As we navigate the realities of career shifts, Herminia shares invaluable insights on why these transitions often take years, not months, and the importance of managing expectations during this journey. We confront the myth of disco...

This week on 4-Quarter Lives we re-publish a conversation between Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and James Root, Senior Partner at international consultancy Bain & Co and Chair of Bain Futures, which looks at future trends. Its report, Better With Age, The Rising Importance of Older Workers , is based on asking some 40,000 people, in 19 countries, a simple but fundamental question: ‘why do you go to work?’...

This week, as part of our series on Mapping the New Q3, we are re-publishing Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation from 2023 with Morag Lynagh, then Unilever’s Global Director of the Future of Work. As a major employer, Unilever is one of the first companies to recognise that people have different needs and expectations of work throughout their working lives. This led to the creation of U-Work with...

In this episode of 4-Quarter Lives, the first of three on the topic of The New Q3, we are re-publishing Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot from 2022. A sociologist and Harvard Professor of Education, with a teaching and writing career spanning five decades, Sara was one of the first academics to examine and focus on the third quarter of life. Her book The Third Chapt...

Everyone talks about longevity. Very few organisations are redesigning anything for it. In this mini-series, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox speaks with three leaders across public health, global hospitality, and telecommunications who are actively moving the dial. Three principles run through every conversation: influence, accessibility, and dignity. NHS: Change From the Middle Helen Bevan Real transformat...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Helen Bevan, one of the UK’s most respected thinkers on large-scale change inside complex systems. Drawing on more than 35 years working inside NHS England, Helen explains why lasting change rarely starts at the top. It starts in the middle. With peers. Through relationships. And through informal influence rather than titles. Helen...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast , Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jean-Yves Minet, Global Brand President of major hospitality group Accor, to explore how longevity is moving beyond luxury retreats and into mainstream hospitality. Jean-Yves brings a cross-industry lens to the conversation. After more than a decade at Estée Lauder Companies, where he helped shape the brand’s approach to l...

As we move into 2026, I’m launching a series of focused mini-series conversations on my 4-Quarter Lives podcast — three or four episodes clustered around one big strategic theme. And this is our first synthesis episode. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with Anu Madgavkar from McKinsey on the hard economics of demographic decline and AI, Dan Pontefract on what he calls “age debt” inside organis...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Dan Pontefract to tackle one of the last big blind spots in corporate leadership. Age. Dan is a long-time culture and leadership thinker, former Chief Learning Officer, and the author of six books on work, purpose, and performance. His latest book, The Future of Work Is Grey, turns the spotlight on what he calls “age debt”,...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Rick Robinson, who leads innovation at AARP and is the driving force behind the Agetech Collaborative. Rick shares how a career spent at the edge of emerging technology led him to longevity innovation. From early work in online media to running AARP’s innovation lab, his focus has stayed constant. Build what matters next, and make...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Anu Madgavkar, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, to explore the collision of two defining forces shaping our future: global demographic decline and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Anu has led two major McKinsey reports published in the same year, one on depopulation and shifting dependency ratios, and the o...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Simon Chan and Dr. Kate Schaefers , co-chairs of the Nexel Collaborative, a not-for-profit network of academic thought leaders promoting college-based midlife transition programmes. As societies shift toward age-diverse populations and 60-year careers, they explore why higher education must evolve from a front-loaded, early-life mo...

In Series 10 of 4-Quarter Lives Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with the leaders of a growing number of university faculties running programmes for individuals looking to change direction as they enter their 3rd Quarter of life. She discusses the origins and motivations for these programmes and how they fit into the evolving role of higher education. This week she speaks with Professor Virginia Cha ,...

In Season 10 of 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with the leaders of a growing number of university faculties developing programmes for individuals looking to change direction in their 3rd Quarter of life. We explore the origins and motivations behind these programmes—and how they fit the evolving role of higher education in ageing societies. This week we are republishing Avivah’s conv...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Dr Amelia Peterson — founding faculty member of the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) — to explore how higher education can reinvent itself for an age of complexity, longevity, and accelerating change. Amelia shares the story behind LIS’s bold rethink of the traditional MBA — an interdisciplinary programme designed not around i...