Second Curves

A Wall Street Journal article, "Physicist Makes "Big Bang" at Citi". Hamid Biglari's career highlights range from improving the efficiency of a fusion reactor to leading McKinsey's investment banking practice to helping restructure the financial services company, Citi, after one of the biggest government bailouts. He's a great example of a boundary crosser.  Photo: Citigroup.…

Other thoughts/hypotheses on Second Curves: There are multiple Second Curves. The hope is that each successive curve will be more successful (steeper curve, higher performance) than the previous one. And in an ideal world, each Second Curve starts off at a higher point than where the previous Second Curve started. The fear in the context…

I’m wondering what causes the start of the Second Curve for individual careers. So I started to draw sigmoid curves for different scenarios of career transition. Here are a few examples. I haven’t yet figured out how to quickly draw these curves electronically so I’ll verbally describe: Laid-off, burned out white collar professional, in the…

I recently came across Charles Handy’s work, a business philosopher, and author of The Age of Paradox. He uses the idea of life cycles (for businesses and for individuals) following the shape of an S-shaped curve, a sigmoid curve, where there is an initial dip followed by growth and decline. In order to minimize the…