Five new books on longer lives, ageing workforces, and what comes next — and what their very existence tells us about a field coming of age.
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Something is happening in business publishing, and it is worth naming.
In the past month, a cluster of serious books on longevity — not wellness, not anti-ageing, not retirement planning in the conventional sense, but the structural implications of longer lives for individuals, organisations, and economies — has arrived on shelves simultaneously. Some are from established voices in the field. Some are debuts. One is from the author of Good to Great, who spent a decade on a question he didn’t expect to be writing about. They come from the US, the UK, and Canada.
The pile is not accidental. The conversation is maturing. And its geography is worth noting: this is an Anglo-American phenomenon, concentrated in the countries where the collision between longer lives and inadequate institutional preparation is most visible, most discussed, and most commercially pressing. The question is which contributions actually advance it.
Here are five worth your attention — with a short note on a sixth that operates in a different register entirely. They come from the US, the UK, and Canada. That geography is not incidental. The longevity conversation is transatlantic, and the three countries are approaching it from different starting points, different policy environments, and different degrees of institutional urgency. The books reflect those differences.
Start here if you are in workforce strategy. Dan Pontefract— a Thinkers50 Radar name, Forbes contributor, and longtime voice on organisational culture — makes the bluntest case yet that experienced workers are not a cost to be managed out but an appreciating asset being systematically squandered.
The argument is not new. The evidence marshalled in its support is more comprehensive than most. Pontefract documents the structural decisions organisations have made — on career ladders, on performance review systems designed for linear progression, on the quiet incentives that push out people in their mid-50s before their knowledge can transfer — and names the cost plainly. Not as an HR problem. As a strategic failure.
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What distinguishes this book from the advocacy literature on older workers is its refusal to soften the critique for the room. Organisations are not simply missing an opportunity. They are making active choices, encoded in policy and culture, that are expensive and counterproductive. Pontefract names those choices and asks leaders to own them.
Full disclosure: I blurbed this book. My words are on the cover. Caveat accordingly.
That said, Simpson — CEO and founder of 55/Redefined, one of the world’s more established platform for the over-50s workforce — has written something that fills a genuine gap. Most books in this space speak either to individuals navigating midlife or to organisations managing an ageing workforce. Simpson addresses both, and does so without the moralising register that tends to make books about older workers feel like advocacy documents rather than strategy texts.
Her central contention — that if you haven’t got an age strategy, you haven’t got a growth strategy — is the kind of formulation that sounds simple until you sit with it. Most organisations have diversity strategies, talent strategies, succession strategies. Almost none have thought explicitly about age as a strategic dimension of any of them.
The US edition publishes this month. For leaders in talent, HR, or workforce planning, this is the book to put in front of a CEO before the next board conversation about ‘the ageing workforce.’ The framing in most of those conversations is still wrong. Simpson corrects it.
Clinton’s second book on longevity builds on the personal framework of ROAR and extends it to the systemic: the argument that the United States — its organisations, its policy architecture, its cultural assumptions — is structurally unprepared for the longevity era it is already in.
What Clinton does better than most writers in this field is hold the individual and the institutional in the same frame. The question of how a 62-year-old redesigns their professional life is not separable from the question of whether the society around them has built the infrastructure — in healthcare, in workforce policy, in financial planning models — to support that redesign. For the most part, it has not.
Clinton’s background — former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, founder of ROAR Forward — gives him an unusual vantage point: he has sat at the intersection of consumer culture and corporate strategy for decades, and he writes from that intersection rather than from the academy or the advocacy movement. The result is a book that is both personally grounded and structurally ambitious, a combination that is rarer in this genre than it should be.
Ten years of research. Two years of writing. An instant New York Times bestseller. And, for readers of Collins’ previous work, a significant departure.
This is not a business book. It is a book about how people navigate the moments when life flips from clarity into what Collins calls fog — the disorienting in-between that follows a cliff event, whether chosen or imposed. He spent a decade studying thirty-four subjects drawn from across human endeavour — musicians, politicians, scientists, athletes — in matched pairs, to understand why some navigate those moments well and others don’t. For the first time, he writes about himself.
The framework is Collins’ own: cliffs, fog, fire, and what he calls the self-knowledge imperative. The concept most likely to land with a business audience is simplex stepping — the discipline of taking the best next step visible, without needing to see the destination. In a planning-obsessed professional culture, the claim that clarity follows action rather than precedes it is more radical than it sounds.
The data point that stays with me: of all the biographies written about Benjamin Franklin, more than half the pages remain when he reaches sixty. Most of what he built, he built in what we would now recognise as his third quarter. Collins is 68. He reports more energy now than at any earlier point in his career.
This is the book in this batch that will be read outside the longevity field. It deserves to be.
Spence is a Canadian age-inclusion advocate and founder of Top Sixty Over Sixty, a platform working with organisations on longevity literacy and multi-generational workforce strategy. Her concept of longevity literacy — the idea that most people, and most organisations, are functionally illiterate about what longer lives actually mean — is one of the more useful frames in this field, and one that is underrepresented in the mainstream business conversation.
Reset, co-authored with Debra Yearwood and published this spring, addresses both the individual and the institutional. The individual argument will be familiar to readers of this genre: the three-stage model is over, reinvention is possible at any age, the second half of life is not decline. The institutional argument is sharper: organisations are not simply failing to capture the value of experienced workers, they are actively illiterate about age as a strategic variable. Spence’s particular focus is on women over 50 — a group she argues faces a compounded invisibility, subject to both ageism and gender bias simultaneously, that standard diversity frameworks largely fail to address.
The North American longevity conversation has been heavily US-dominated. Spence represents a Canadian voice building serious institutional infrastructure around these questions. That geography matters: different policy environments, different healthcare systems, different workforce demographics produce different pressures and different possibilities. Reset is a useful reminder that the longevity challenge is not one country’s problem to solve.
Taylor, the author of several career-related books has taken this one out of the mainstream business-book ecosystem, and deliberately so. A chartered psychologist who completed her doctorate at 64, she is self-publishing ThriveSpan this week — by choice, not necessity. She wanted control over the structure, the pacing, and the feel of the book, and it shows. ThriveSpan is not organised into chapters. It moves through paths. It offers what Taylor calls glades — places to sit, reflect, and return to. There is nothing to complete. Nothing to optimise.
A Different Take
Denise Taylor
In a genre increasingly crowded with frameworks, action plans, and five-step guides to the second half of life, that is a more radical position than it sounds. Taylor’s argument — built across years of psychological practice and her own lived transitions, including divorce at 60, a vision quest, and a deliberate sabbatical — is that later life is less about reinvention than about recalibration: learning to recognise contribution that doesn’t look productive, and to inhabit a pace the body and mind can genuinely sustain.
This is not a book for the Forbes reader looking for workforce strategy. It is a book for the Forbes reader who quietly suspects that workforce strategy is not the whole story — and who may need permission to think differently about what the second half of a working life is actually for.
Taken together, these five books — plus Taylor’s quieter counterpoint — mark something. The longevity field is no longer a niche conversation between demographers and retirement specialists. It has reached the mainstream business shelf, and the indie publishing ecosystem, simultaneously.
The geographic spread is worth noting. Books simultaneously publishing from Canada, the US, and the UK. The Anglo-American world is where the collision between longer lives and inadequate institutional preparation is most acute, most visible, and most commercially legible. The UK has a National Health Service under sustained demographic pressure and a workforce that is ageing faster than its policy frameworks are adapting. Canada has a workforce demographics challenge its employers are only beginning to name. The US has the largest longevity economy in the world and some of the weakest institutional infrastructure for navigating it.
The better books in this batch share a quality that distinguishes serious work in any field: they are willing to name what isn’t working. Pontefract names the organisational failures plainly. Collins names the fog, rather than promising to dispel it. Clinton names the systemic gaps that individual reinvention cannot bridge alone. Spence names the compounded invisibility that standard frameworks miss. Taylor names the part of later life that optimisation language cannot reach.
The question they collectively raise for leaders is not whether longer lives are coming. That question is settled. The question is whether the organisations, career structures, and cultural assumptions we have built are fit for the lives people are now actually living.
On both sides of the Atlantic, most of them are not.
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