At the World Economic Forum last year, one management professor who was instructing students in their early 20s — some of whom might work into their 90s — was heard lamenting “what can I teach them that will still be relevant in 2085?”

Go back 70 years to appreciate the scale of the challenge. Only in 1947 did the word “entrepreneur” appear in a Harvard Business School course description and even then it was years before it took root. Jeffrey Cruikshank writes in Shaping the Waves, a history of the teaching of entrepreneurship at Harvard, that these “were the modest beginnings of a faculty effort that would take nearly a half-century to come into its own”.

Business schools sometimes like to give the impression that what they teach will endure a lifetime. But as Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott point out in their new book The 100-Year Life, as more people live for a century or even longer, the three traditional stages of a working life — education, career and retirement — will blur and break down.