You already live the decade business schools just discovered

On 23 September, London Business School opened the SARI Foundation Institute for Work, Careers and Longevity. It runs on a £25 million gift, and two of the school's best-known professors, Lynda Gratton and Herminia Ibarra, are behind it.

The next day Avivah Wittenberg-Cox wrote it up in Forbes under the headline "Business Schools Are Waking Up To Longevity". Her one-line summary of the shift was this:

She also gave the years after 50 a new name. She calls them "the new Q3: the roughly 25 years from 50 to 75 that have been inserted into modern adult life. These are increasingly not simply the years in which people wind down from work. They may include some of their most productive, entrepreneurial and purposeful decades.

That's an unusual claim to come out of the business-school world. It also sits oddly beside a question an independent professional over 50 can still get asked in a first meeting with a prospective client: how long do you plan to keep doing this? And to be honest, I wonder the same about me!

If you've been asked it, you'll know the half-second before you answer.

I'm writing this from inside those years. I'm 70, I run Wisepreneurs as a one-person practice, and I've recorded 100+ episodes of the podcast with independent professionals building practice on their own terms.

What the new Q3 reframe means for a solo practice

Wittenberg-Cox is writing for institutions. Her readers are the people running business schools, HR functions and succession plans, working out how to manage a workforce that now spans five generations. As she puts it, "A career that once lasted 30 or 40 years may now stretch across five or six decades."

That agenda belongs to them. What you need is clients who want what you do, and none of the curriculum work changes that.

What carries over is the claim underneath the new label. A credible institution has now said, in public, that the years after 50 can be among the most productive of a working life.

I'd take the idea and ignore the label. "Q3" is a term built for a boardroom slide describing you as a category, whereas a solo practice gets hired for being one particular person.

Why your value grows with use while raw speed peaks earlier

Some of what you bring to a client grows every time you use it. Some of it wears out. The two behave very differently, and it helps to know the difference.

Picture the moment a client describes their problem and you recognise its shape, because you've seen or heard enough versions of it to know the surface description can hide a different problem. That recognition gets sharper with each new version of the problem you meet.

Knowledge and pattern-reading, built through use, keep growing well into later life. Raw processing speed (how fast you can pick up a brand new software platform, or juggle six unfamiliar variables at once) peaks much earlier. There is good evidence that long experience changes the way you think.

Technical knowledge sits on the use-by-date side of things. The specific platform, the regulation as it stood five years ago, the version of the tool you trained on: that kind of knowledge turns over in a few years, whatever your age. The side that keeps improving is what the research on cognitive vitality in professionals over 50 is about.

The reading of situations sits on the other side. When people call it judgment, this is what they mean in practice. It's knowing what good looks like for this client even when you can't put a number on it, and choosing which of the answers in front of you fits their situation. This is the pattern recognition clients pay a premium for.

There's a second force working in your favour, and it comes from the market around you. The junior work where people used to learn a trade (first drafts, basic research, routine analysis) is increasingly handed to software. That means fewer people get the long run of practice that builds a reading of situations. The pipeline that produces your kind of experience is narrowing, so the experience itself gets scarcer.

One caution, though: that reading of situations lives in the meeting between your experience and a specific client. You can see it in the question that changes how a client sees their own brief (someone asks how to get more clients, and you ask what happened after the second meeting with the last three prospects), and in the connection you make between two problems they thought were separate. Its value depends on staying in the conversations where it gets used.

The new skill is getting good at transition itself

If the growing side of your work is the good news, the institute's research names the harder part.

Herminia Ibarra's work, as Wittenberg-Cox reports it, says people "need to become skilled not simply at finding the next job, but at transition itself: experimenting, exiting and tolerating that uncomfortable space in which you know what you are leaving but don't yet know what you are moving towards."

Lynda Gratton offers a picture to replace the career ladder. A working life, in her account, is "woven" from "skills, relationships, work, learning, energy and, above all, time. The metaphor morphs from climbing to weaving."

For someone employed, those ideas are about moving between jobs. For a solo practice they describe how the business itself changes shape. You may move from the work you were known for to the work you want to be known for, and then again when a market shifts or your energy does. Each move carries the uncomfortable middle stretch Ibarra describes, where the old offer still pays the bills and the new one hasn't proven itself yet.

What's sometimes called a second curve is the new way of working you start building while the old one is still carrying you. The reframe adds one thing to that idea: you'll probably do it more than once. If a career can run five or six decades, transition becomes a recurring part of running the practice, much like the tax return. That recurring transition is the thread through the Relational Transitions articles.

In practice that might look like testing a new offer with two or three existing clients before it goes on your website, or taking one engagement in a new field alongside your usual work. Small, bounded experiments shorten the uncomfortable middle, because you're learning from real clients as you go.

What the productive years look like up close

"Productive, entrepreneurial and purposeful" reads well in a headline. Up close, building a solo practice in these years is more ordinary than that, and a bit more awkward. Three pieces I've read recently put the helps to explain this further.

Sam Spurlin runs a one-person work design practice and writes about it in his newsletter, The Deliberate. In a recent end-of-summer update he was candid about the insecurities that come with working alone: writing "we" and "us" on a website run by one person, and holding off on putting out a newsletter at a regular rhythm.

Those are small things. They're also the kind of hesitation that stops a capable person being seen for what they do.

My own site says "I", because Wisepreneurs is just me, and The Wisepreneur newsletter goes out every Tuesday. Those are the same two choices Spurlin names: "I" instead of "we", and a fixed day to send.

David Kadavy's book Mind Management, Not Time Management makes the case that the thing worth managing is your mental energy, ahead of the clock. In his words, "mind management is about matching your task with your mental state and the stage of your process."

For a practice built on thinking work, that's a practical rule. The client strategy work goes into the hours when your head is clearest, and the admin goes somewhere else. Gratton's list, you'll notice, has energy in it too.

Richard David Hames, writing in The Hames Report about why Australia's productivity figures look stalled, identifies the thing that resists that measurement as "the economics of presence": work whose value is being there, whose time is the service. He is writing about aged care and education, but the same holds for the work you sell.

A large part of what a client pays you for is presence of that kind. It's someone who has been in similar rooms, who listens for what isn't being said, and who stays with the problem until it's clear. Output volume is a poor measure of it.

Will clients see my age as a liability?

When a prospective client asks how long you plan to keep doing this, the question can carry one of two practical worries. 

• Will you be around for the length of the work? 
• And is what you know still current? 

Both are fair, and both have practical answers, which work better than reassurance.

Continuity is answered by the shape of the engagement. A defined term, a clear scope and a plan for handover tell the client what they're buying.

Currency is answered by showing it. Talk about the tools you actually use now, the recent changes in the client's field you've tracked, the thing you changed your mind about this year. The wearing-out side of your knowledge is the side you keep renewing, and you can show that you do.

Then there's the part a younger competitor can't yet offer, however capable they are. A language model can give your client a fluent, plausible answer in seconds. What it can't do is tell them which of several plausible answers fits their business, given their history, their people and what the last decision cost them. That choosing is where your years show up, because it rests on having seen how similar calls played out.

You're the working version of what the institute will study

London Business School has built an institute, with a £25 million gift behind it, to study the years you're already working in. Forbes has given those years a name.

You don't need the name to own what it describes. If you're building a practice after 50, you're already running the experiment the institute has been set up to study. You're doing the work in these years, changing its shape as you go, and getting paid for a reading of situations that only comes from time spent in them.

The business schools have just named the decade.

You've been the working version of it all along.

Frequently asked questions

References

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, "Business Schools Are Waking Up To Longevity. Women Lead The Way." Forbes, 24 September 2026. The launch of London Business School's SARI Foundation Institute, the "new Q3" framing, and Herminia Ibarra's and Lynda Gratton's work as reported there.

Sam Spurlin, "An End of Summer Update from Deliberate Works", The Deliberate, 2026. A solo consultant's candid account of the insecurities of a one-person practice.

David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management. The case for managing mental energy, ahead of clock time.

Richard David Hames, "The Arithmetic of Standing Still", The Hames Report, 2026. An essay on Australia's productivity figures that introduces "the economics of presence".

Every Tuesday I send The Wisepreneur, a short letter for experienced professionals building independent practice: one usable idea a week. Sign up at wisepreneurs.com.au/newsletter

When you want a second pair of eyes on your own practice, a close look at what you do, how you describe it and what to charge, that's how I work with people one on one (the Positioning and Practice Audit): wisepreneurs.com.au/positioning-and-practice-audit