DOUBLING DOWN: The Secret Sauce for Dual-Career Families begins with an eye-opening revelation: “Couples juggling two jobs are now the norm—among married-couple families with children, 64 percent have both parents employed.” Among millennials, it is later revealed, the figure is as high as 78 percent. As the landscape of the modern family changes, and dual working couples diversify along gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability status, this book promises to help navigate the challenges that balancing the demands of everything pursuing a career and having a family entails. As Coronavirus has changed the way we all work and communicate, and the rapid advancement of technology likewise continues to shape the very future of industry and employment all around the world, the whole relationship between career and family life is one many of us should be thinking a little harder about.
DOUBLING DOWN feels most targeted to young to mid-stage career professionals thinking about starting their own families and curious about how they can be great parents without compromising their career goals, or those with young children already. Divided into ten chapters, it covers everything from being a supportive partner and managing money, to adjusting to retirement and juggling travel demands. One of the huge benefits here is that the story, lessons and guidance presented are all shaped by a couple who have lived it for themselves, who have actively practiced what they preach and reaped the benefits, both personally and professionally. Ilene Gordon and Bram Bluestein’s words carry an added weight of authority as a result, and as their own biographies attest to, they did it all without sacrificing any of their own professional goals.
Gordon was a pioneering businesswoman who served as CEO of Ingredion and was the twenty-first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Bluestein had a 35-year career as a top management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, A.T. Kearney and the Boston Consulting Group and advised some of the largest companies in the world on addressing the most difficult and complex matters. The two share the writing work, which creates a nice balance throughout the text. The chapter on technology and how to utilize it for the benefit of your family is surprising and very interesting, while the section that encourages deep thought around where a dual-career family should choose to make their home is really eye opening, and a key factor that to which many couples may not have devoted enough attention.
The prose in DOUBLING DOWN is breezy, engaging and well edited, cramming a plethora of experience and acumen into not much more than a hundred pages. The lack of in-depth comment from anyone beyond the two authors themselves is the one area where readers may feel there was an opportunity missed: interviews with the couple’s now adult children on their experiences, or the detailed thoughts of some of their close business associates might have provided some more angles of interest, but this is a minor point. For anyone considering how to juggle work and personal time in their own dual-career family, it is a superbly useful read.
Ilene Gordon and Bram Bluestein’s DOUBLING DOWN is a timely, well-observed and superbly valuable addition to the career guidance genre that draws expertly on the author’s own successful careers and dual-career family life to share insights of real substance.
~Joseph Sharratt for IndieReader