4-Quarter Lives Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

Terri Harrington is one of the members of the first cohort of a new program at the University of Colorado Denver, called Change-Makers. In this podcast series so far, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox has talked with people who have gone through equivalent programs at Harvard and Stanford, and she has been intrigued to see new options opening up at a number of other schools not only in the US but in other countries. In this conversation she was keen to understand what the Denver program is offering, what drew Terri to it, and what she is hoping to emerge from this shift in direction after a lifetime in the law.
Terri Harrington is a founding attorney of Harrington Brewster Mahoney Smits law firm in Denver, Colorado. In this role she has practiced law for over 40 years, providing counsel and support to clients throughout the greater Denver area and across Colorado. Her specialization has been in family law, mediation, conflict coaching and divorce. She is an ardent advocate of mediation in family disputes as an alternative to litigation and lectures on collaborative law, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution. She formerly served many years on the executive council of the Family Law Section of the Colorado Bar, was a board member of the Colorado Collaborative Law Professionals and is a current member of the Rocky Mountain Collaborative Law Professionals. Terri worked tirelessly for ten years until Colorado enacted the Colorado Collaborative Law Act in 2021. She was awarded the ICON award in 2022 by the Family Law Bar.
Useful Links:
* Denver Change-Makers Program: https://www.ucdenver.edu/change-makers  
* Terri Harrington bio: https://www.hbmslaw.com/terri-harrington
* ‘Old School – Mid-Life Transition Programs Take Off’ – Forbes Article
* ‘Next Chapter Matters: Two More Universities Launch Mid-Life Programs – Forbes Article (Part 2)    
* The Race2Dinner Book Club, mentioned by Terri: Race2Dinner Book Club  


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For International Women’s Day, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is delighted to have Professor Claudia Goldin join her on 4-Quarter Lives. Claudia is Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Gender in the Economy Study Group. Her research uses history to explore the origins of issues in the present, particularly with regard to women’s lives and careers. She has explored the history of women’s search for career and family, co-education in higher education, the impact of “The Pill” on career and family decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons why women are not the majority of undergraduates and the new lifecycle of women’s employment.
Professor Goldin’s most recent book, published in 2021, is Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity.  In it she provides a history of all these factors in women’s advancement and concludes with the impact of the pandemic on women’s careers and couple equity.  As she and Avivah discuss in this episode, lengthening lives and careers is an important part of this story of a century of progress, stumbling blocks and future opportunities for both men and women around the world.
Useful Links:
* Claudia Goldin: Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. (Princeton University Press)
* Claudia Goldin: Wikipedia Bio.
* ‘A Century of Women, Work – and Juggling Family’ – Forbes Article by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox  


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The guest this week in 4-Quarter Lives is Barbara Waxman, whose work Avivah Wittenberg-Cox came across early on in her exploration of the topic of how to manage our ever longer lives. Barbara is a gerontologist and coach and has combined both these areas in a career focused on helping people become both more effective professionally and at the same time truer to who they themselves are as individuals. With a background in gerontology, she found at the start of her own empty-nester years a chance to reconsider her own trajectory, and realised just how much more opportunity the years ahead had to offer. Recognising the similarity between this turbulent time and that of adolescence, she coined the term ‘Middlescence’ and authored a book aptly called The Middlescence Manifesto: Igniting the Passion of Midlife. She serves as an Advisory Council Member for the Stanford Center on Longevity and is a faculty member of the Modern Elder Academy. In this conversation Barbara and Avivah talk about the ‘3Rs’ of the subject – Reality, Response and Roadmap and about the different challenges of this time for men and women.  And Barbara introduces yet another wonderful reframing – that instead of thinking about ‘retirement’ we should move to ‘preferment’.
Links relevant to this episode:
Barbara Waxman’s Website: https://barbarawaxman.com
Barbara Waxman’s Middlescence Website: https://middlescence.co
To buy The Middlescence Manifesto click here (Amazon.com)
The Stanford Center on Longevity: https://longevity.stanford.edu
The Modern Elder Academy:  https://www.modernelderacademy.com
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbarawaxman/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/BarbaraWaxman


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In this week’s episode of 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Dawn Browne. Dawn is the People & Talent Director of Fuller’s, a hospitality company that runs some 200 hundred pubs and restaurants in the UK, across London and Hampshire, and employs 5,000 people. In today’s talent-strapped Britain, Fuller’s has been running contrary to the ageism many people accuse companies of. They have been going out to recruit older workers, and wooing them with flexibility and benefits. Recently they announced a new partnership with Rest Less, a digital community and advocate for people aged over 50, with a view to attracting more mature workers.
Dawn Browne is a highly experienced people and development director, with a background in both hospitality and travel – two sectors where customer relations are key for consumer loyalty. She is convinced that older people bring particularly high levels of customer service and interaction. She tells us why this is so important for the business, what generational balance brings, and how to build it, sustainably.
Some Useful Links:
* For a link to Fuller’s, click here
* For a link to Rest Less, click here


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Focus on Stage (Not Age)
Susan Wilner Golden is the Founder and Director of the dciX initiative at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, or DCI, a similar program to the one at Harvard (the Advanced Leadership Initiative). Her focus is on the intersection of longevity and innovation and the unique entrepreneurial opportunities that longer lives and the growing $22 trillion longevity economy present. She integrates multiple perspectives based on her professional experiences in public health, venture capital, and as an advisor and mentor to startup companies and teams. Her aim is to help entrepreneurs identify the unique features of starting companies focused on older adults and the many market opportunities for new products and services in the fastest growing sector.
Susan’s book STAGE (Not Age) was published in 2022 by Harvard Business Review Press. She shares fascinating insights into how companies are thinking and innovating around the massive longevity opportunity, which she also outlines in this podcast.
Susan Wilner Golden
Susan is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an adjunct professor at Stanford School of Medicine. She also serves as a mentor in residence to the Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator, and is a thought leader partner with Pivotal Ventures for initiatives on innovations for caregivers of older adults. Previously she was a partner at Schroder Ventures, a firm specializing in life sciences and healthcare investments. She also worked at Genentech, taught at University of California San Francisco, where she was a Pew Health Policy Fellow, and was an assistant professor at the Boston University Medical School. Golden received a Doctorate of Science from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Get a Discount on the Book
Harvard Business Review Press is generously offering a 30% coupon code for purchasers of STAGE (Not Age) for listeners to the 4- Quarter Lives Podcast. To benefit from this opportunity please click here and enter the Promo Code STAGE2023.
Other Useful Links:
* Stanford Distinguished Career Institute
* Stanford Center on Longevity
* Stanford dciX
* Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator


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This week’s guest with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox on 4-Quarter Lives is environmentalist and educator Dr. Mary Pearl. Mary was born and raised to be a New York debutante but had other plans. Her mother wanted her to go to Wellesley College for Women, but Yale opened to women just in the nick of time (1972). She then flew the coop again, becoming a biologist and exploring the behaviours of primates in the wild. This led her to connect the dots between the health of humans, wildlife and eco systems – the concept of conservation medicine - well before this was on everyone’s agenda. As president of the Ecohealth Alliance, Mary helped build careers of local scientists and educators in 20 high-biodiversity countries around the world. She also sits on the boards of Brazil’s Institute for Ecological Research and the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and is convener of the International Biodiversity Network.
Move into Education
Mary’s 3rd Quarter saw her move into academe where she became the founding dean of Stony Brook University’s College of Sustainability. Later, she became the Dean of Macaulay Honors College, the City University of New York’s school for its top students. At 72, she decided to step back and to go to Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, a move that has taken her in interesting, and surprising new directions.
This episode was recorded in 2022, when Mary was still at Stanford. Since then she has continued to write, and has recently become an advisor to the Helping Africa  Foundation for their program extending high quality education, especially in the STEM fields, to every district in Ghana.

Some useful links:
* Dr. Mary Pearl bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_C._Pearl
* Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute: https://dci.stanford.edu
* International Biodiversity Network: https://www.biodiversitynetwork.org
* Center for Large Landscape Conservation: https://largelandscapes.org
* Helping Africa Foundation: https://helpingafrica.org


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