Top Highlights

• David was immediately headhunted by a rival company to lead its largest business, in a city where Helen found a position at a prestigious hospital. David’s career was back on track, and his wife’s was launched. And David’s old employer had lost a talented leader—after spotting him, grooming him, and offering him a plum role.
• The crux of the problem is that companies tend to have fixed paths to leadership roles, with set tours of duty and long-held ideas about what ambition looks like
• It originated in the early 1980s, before technology had opened the door to efficient, productive virtual work. For the most part, talent was “unbounded” (my term)
• spouses didn’t have competing careers, so they managed home and family life, freeing up executives to meet their companies’ demands.
• Members of dual-career couples understand that they’ll need to make multiple moves across functions and geographies if they want to ascend to senior roles—and they’re not averse to that

Domain