“Losing one path does not mean you’re losing your capacity to build another.” — Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu
What if your career isn’t a ladder to climb, but a perennial that blooms, rests and blooms again from the same roots?
In this episode of Leadership Story Talks, hosts Jerome Deroy and Julienne B. Ryan welcome Galya Frayman Molinas and Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu, co-founders of the What’s Next Initiative and co-authors of The Many Lives of Work: Rethinking Career in the Age of Longevity. Galya spent more than three decades in global leadership, including over 20 years at the Coca-Cola Company, where she led businesses across Mexico, Turkey and Central Asia and served as Senior Vice President of Global Strategy. Today she teaches strategy at London Business School. Gamze spent more than a decade at Harvard Business School’s MENA Research Center and is now training as a psychotherapist at Regent’s University London.
Both know reinvention firsthand. Gamze grew up expecting to join her family’s business as a third-generation member. Ten years in, a dispute in the generation above her meant she was asked to leave, and it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under her. Galya, after leaving the company that had shaped her and her family across countries and cultures, had to ask herself who she had become and what she wanted to carry forward. A mutual friend introduced them over coffee in London. That conversation turned into a year of reading, research and holding each other accountable, and eventually into a book.
Together, they explain why the linear career model of learn, work, retire no longer fits lives that are getting longer. They also show how a new way of thinking can turn career gaps, sabbaticals and pauses from failures to explain into chances for renewal.
You’ll Hear:
- How being asked to leave her family’s business taught Gamze that losing one path doesn’t mean losing the ability to build another.
- How Galya’s global career shaped her identity and her family, and the “design question” she faced when she moved on.
- How a courtesy coffee between two “proud nerds” became a partnership and a book.
- Why longer lives break the old learn-work-retire career model, and why education now has to happen throughout our working lives.
- The three pillars of their alternative framework: cycles of growth, pause and renewal; experience as a foundation that is never wasted; and a zigzag path of iteration and experiments.
- Why the metaphor of the ladder no longer works, and what “perennial careers” offer instead.
- What the “systemic gap” is, why change starts with individuals before institutions catch up, and what that means for people who hire.
- Why community, mentors and a personal board of directors act as a walking stick through transition.
- Why there’s no award for finding your next thing the quickest, and how midlife frees us to make ourselves proud instead of our parents.
Ultimately, Galya and Gamze remind us that longevity adds years to our lives, but it’s up to us to breathe life into those years. As they put it, we are all perennials. A pause isn’t the end of the story. Sometimes it’s simply time spent tending our roots before we bloom again.
Resources
The Many Lives of Work
- Book: The Many Lives of Work: Rethinking Career in the Age of Longevity by Galya Frayman Molinas and Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu
The What’s Next Initiative
The Authors
- Galya Frayman Molinas on LinkedIn
- Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu on LinkedIn
- All episodes: narativ.com/podcast
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