Roundtable discussions aimed towards growing long-lasting relationships with other influential leaders across the US
Research-driven thought leadership on people experience design and strategy tailored, tailored towards the workforce of 2022
Best practice collaboration to equip your organization with people-improving factors to succeed this year
We'll keep it informal. Here's what we'll cover:
Introductions and a brief spotlight on Cody Carr, VP of Product & Technology for Amazon's Workforce Technology, who built one of Amazon's highest-performing AI-enabled engineering organizations, to kick off the conversation.
Group roundtable discussion focused on how seasoned professionals are turning decades of judgment into an advantage while AI reshapes which expertise gets valued.
Q&A and best practice collaboration on what peers are actually doing to stay in demand, and the missteps they would avoid in their own next chapter.
Cody Carr spent 13 years at Amazon, most recently as a Vice President, rebuilding legacy technology into systems that modern AI could actually run on. He took a 12-year-old platform serving 1.3M annual hires and 1.4M employees and rebuilt it as an AI-enabled ecosystem, consolidating eight independent technology organizations into one along the way and growing the product and engineering group from 50 to 2,000+ people. Earlier at Amazon, he led the process engineering behind the early robotics fulfillment network, which was the same problem in a different form: redesigning how people and machines share the work. Before Amazon, he ran operations at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility and served a decade in the United States Navy's nuclear power program.
Cody believes careers are built, not stumbled into. He brings the same rigor he used to run systems at scale to the way people navigate their own next chapter, so a search feels like a plan rather than a hope.
Craig Mangan has spent nearly 30 years as a creative director and writer, working with brands like ESPN, the NBA, Amazon, Logitech, Clorox, and Ubisoft. He founded and sold his own agency, Funworks, and tends to see problems the way an operator does, not just a creative. Today he's a freelance creative director, copywriter, and consultant, and fractional CMO of Second Act Shift.
The best moments of his career have always been team sports. People who take the work seriously but not themselves. That's what pulled him into Second Act: rooms full of experienced people figuring out what's next, together. Before any of it, he was fired as a parking lot attendant. He maintains it wasn't entirely his fault, but he's decided to move on.
Dan Rollman is an executive coach and creator of the Second Act framework, a model for helping mid-career professionals design their next chapter. He’s guided over 200 people through it, including leaders from Google, ESPN, Disney, and Apple. Prior to coaching, he was a venture-funded founder who appeared on Shark Tank, CNN, and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and a creative leader who wrote two Super Bowl commercials and national campaigns for Domino’s, HP, AT&T, and the NBA.
Dan holds a relentless belief that the best is yet to come, both for himself and those he works with. He makes space for clients to find their own authentic path and build the nerve to live by it.
Kenny White runs Electric Thinking, where he helps leaders close the gap between having AI and actually using it to do better work. His team has trained people at companies like Visa, ESPN, ABC, and Intuit, and his approach comes down to one idea: the tools matter far less than how you think with them. Most people are using a sliver of what AI can do, and he built a business out of changing that. He has spoken at HumanX and Human Tech Week, and his work has been featured in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
Second Act is a community for experienced professionals navigating career reinvention through executive coaching, practical AI guidance, and meaningful connections with peers entering their next chapter.
We create experiences, resources, and connections that enable professionals to explore new possibilities, gain clarity, and move confidently toward a meaningful next chapter in their careers and lives.
