# Strategic Career Planning for the 100-Year Life

**Podcast:** HBR IdeaCast
**Published:** 2026-08-18

## Transcript

I'm Adi Ignatius.
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
So, Alison, as you know, my father passed away recently at the age of 104.
He stayed sharp pretty much up to the end, and that is relevant to our conversation today.
Yes, I was so sorry about his passing.
He was such an amazing man, not only a father to you and several highly accomplished siblings, but Secretary of the Navy in the 1960s and then a successful businessman.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
But my point in mentioning that is that a lifespan like his is becoming less and less rare.
We're living longer.
We're living healthier.
There are many more centenarians, and that has profound implications for work and for our careers.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I...
personally want to work until I'm 100, but I do think that old notions about retiring at the age of 60 or 65 don't really make sense anymore.
Many of us can be very productive and lead valuable work lives for much longer.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think management has to adapt to this.
I mean, individuals do too.
And our guest today, Linda Gratton, has excellent advice on how people should think about their career options over a relatively long time span.
Grattan is a professor of management practice at London Business School and is author of the new book, Living the 100-Year Life, which builds on her earlier book, co-written with Andrew Scott, called The 100-Year Life.
She has a lot to share about how we can plan our careers differently in light of our longevity and what organizations need to do to keep up.
Here's our conversation.
You know, for our audience, I want to talk mostly about the implications of this on work and career.
But before that, I mean, you know, at a high altitude, how should we think about all of our very possibly centenarian lives about the pace, the expectations, about their pursuit of happiness?
Well, I would say we've always wanted to have more years.
Anyone, if you ask anyone, what would you like?
Would you like more years?
Everybody's going to say, yes, of course, I'd love more years.
And actually, right now, we have that opportunity.
We have the opportunity to do what our parents and grandparents didn't do, which is to live a great deal longer.
But of course, that's...
complex for us in many ways, because some of the ways that our institutions are formed, the assumptions we have about our lives, all of those are based on the idea of a three-stage life.
You know, you are educated, you work and you retire at 60 or 65, and then you live maybe for 10 years.
But now I'm saying you could live to 100.
Everything else has to be remade.
This generation of people, whatever age or this age you are right now, all of us.
are learning how to do that, whether we're 70, 50, or 30.
We're actually learning, what does it take when you live a 100-year life?
I'm incredibly optimistic about it.
I think it's a wonderful thing.
But it does mean that we have to change the way we think about our lives.
So I tend to be somebody who lives to work as opposed to works to live.
How should somebody like me think about my working identity in this era, in this new world?
The economics of a 100-year life is that you need to make money in some form or another, probably into your 70s or even your 80s, unless you've saved 20% of your income from the time that you started to work, or maybe 15%.
And very few of us have done that.
Have not.
You haven't.
No, neither did I.
So it's a sort of a financial reality, but I don't think it's really that that makes it important.
I think what really makes it important is the idea that work can be such a wonderful thing for humans.
You know, it brings so much things.
It develops our skills.
It allows us to meet new people.
especially of different generations, which I think is really important as you age.
It allows us to have new experiences.
So I am all for working into our 70s and even possibly our 80s.
But then, of course, to do that, you've got to think about, well, how are you going to do that?
And what sort of work do I do?
And that, I think, is the question that lots of people are asking right now.
Well, and it is the career ladder.
I mean, the blueprint of the working life now, you know, for younger people is very different from when I, entered the workforce where, you know, you work for one company or maybe a couple for long stretches.
You know, is the career ladder obsolete?
Is that not the way to think about work and career now?
Well, you know, if you think about a ladder, you know, you can imagine yourself climbing up that ladder.
And what does it require?
Well, it requires a lot of energy, but not really a lot of agency because all you have to do is put, you know, one hand on the next rung.
What I think is happening now is that we have to use our personal agency.
And that's something that's entirely different from what we've had to do in the past.
And, you know, there's lots of ways of thinking about, you know, lots of metaphors to think about your life.
The one that I use is the idea of weaving your life, where you're the weaver.
and you're weaving your life.
And every day you're weaving a life that creates both productivity for you, but also nurture.
And those two elements to your life are so important because you need both of them.
But the reality is that they're hard to deliver at every point in our time.
I think many of us are relatively passive, have exercised relatively little agency in our careers because...
we've been headhunted, somebody has come out and, or we need a job and we apply to 10 places and one says, yeah, you know, there's a passivity to that.
You know, you're really urging us to be, to have that kind of agency.
And that's important if you're going to live to your 70 or live to your 100.
Why are we so bad at that and how do we get better at that?
Well, I think, you know, fundamental to the career ladder was this idea that the transaction between you and the organization is that you were a child and the organization was an adult.
It was sort of an adult-child thing where the organization said, don't worry, I'll look after you.
And you as a child said, okay, I'll do the best I can.
You know, I'll put one hand above the other on the ladder.
We've actually moved to something which is much more adult-to-adult.
Adult in the sense of what organizations require of you and what they say they want and the deal they describe, but also adult in terms of how we as individuals make commitments, understand ourselves, decide in a reflective way what we want.
And I think we've been moving.
I wrote a book years ago called The Democratic Enterprise, which described the beginnings of that shift.
And I think that shift is now really, really on its way.
And being an adult means.
You have to be proactive.
And that's something that I talk about a lot in the book.
How do you gather your proactivity?
So you write that we should all try to weave our 100-year life into our 20s, into our 30s, into our 40s and 50s.
What do you mean exactly by that?
What I love about the metaphor of weaving a life is that when you think about your life as a loom...
There's a past, you know, all the stuff you've woven already.
There's where you are right now, the choices you and I are making right this moment.
And then we have the future, which of course is hard for us to imagine, but we do have a sense of what our future self is.
And I think that's a really profoundly human idea.
And across that loom, there are threads that help us to be productive.
You know, threads like mastery or knowing, cooperating or amplifying, which is the way we work with AI.
And they're really important.
But if you just have that, then you burn out.
So the threads of nurture are also really important.
Threads which are about our relationships, intimacy, friendship, but also how we manage energy, both in terms of calming ourselves and indeed in terms of creating adventure.
And those eight threads are there in our lives at all times.
And it's we who choose which to strengthen.
and which to leave fragile.
Now, often we don't make that choice consciously, and sometimes we regret those choices.
But each one of us has got to that stage at any point in time in our life.
So we've been talking mostly about how individuals should think about their lives and their careers.
But I want to move it into the institutional level now, because I don't think our laws or our protocols or our practices are in step with everything you're writing about.
Our institutions do basically shuffle people off when they're 60 or 65 because they're too old or they're too highly paid or don't know the new technologies.
That seems to me that needs to be resolved, that that's a fundamental conflict in this era where we are living, not only living longer, but we're healthy and we can be productive.
We need to be productive.
And workplace laws that are probably 100 years old.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we just haven't yet designed institutions for longevity.
We really haven't.
We're beginning to design them for technology, but we still haven't designed them for longevity.
And that's going to be difficult because it means letting go of a whole lot of assumptions that came with the career ladder about promotion being the only way up, about...
people staying for a long period of time and never coming back again or not coming in at the age of 30.
But, you know, every step, every step is a step that you take.
You can't take sabbaticals.
You can't work flexibly.
So, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that has to change.
And, you know, when you see change happening at the level of a society, individuals are always the first sort of thing to change.
And then institutions eventually catch up.
And I think we're in that stage right now.
I mean, I have colleagues who are working into the 80s.
Other companies have.
I've got friends who are taking sabbaticals at different times in their life.
There's fathers who are doing parental leave in a way that they never did before.
So the world, you know, freelancers, you remember the HBR article that Dan Gerson and I I wrote about the huge increase in freelancers.
So we're already seeing a lot of those early signs that actually organizations, perhaps not realizing that that's what they're doing, they are becoming more flexible about the way they employ people.
And that's really, you know, helps anyone who wants a portfolio life or a multi-stage life.
many of us afford the portfolio life or is that, I mean, the portfolio life sounds great to me at my stage and at this stage in my career, a portfolio life, you know, my kids, young people I know, you know, there's no health insurance, there's no, you know, the portfolio life is a constant hustle.
Is that?
Is that what we need to adapt to?
Well, it could be, you know, there's lots of different ways of running a life.
And, you know, my thinking is that there might be times when you just want to stay with a company.
There might be times when you want multi-stages and a multi-stage means that you stay with the company and then perhaps you start your own business, perhaps you do something else.
So the variety is in a sequence, but the variety can also be horizontal, like in a portfolio where you try and do all these things at the same time.
And as you rightly say, Adi, I mean, that's hard to pull off.
And we think about...
people in their 60s and 70s being able to pull it off.
But interestingly, when I asked my MBA students, how many of you anticipate having some sort of a portfolio life?
A load of them put up their hands.
And then I said, well, what age do you think this is going to happen?
And they said, right now.
I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
They're seeing it as a life choice from the beginning, not something you build up.
Now, why are they thinking that?
Well, I think that HBR article that Diane and I wrote about freelancers gives you a little bit of an understanding of that.
Because actually, if you build skills, if you work as a freelancer, if you start your own business, you actually can begin to build a portfolio much earlier than we had imagined would be possible.
Now, that's not to say...
that lots of people are going to build portfolios.
It'll be the majority.
But I think what we are going to see is a lot more variety about the fabric of our life.
You know, when you say it's a ladder that everybody's climbing.
everybody's climbing the ladder together and they're all going up in the same way.
When you say it's a fabric that we're weaving, actually your pattern could be so different from my pattern.
And that's what I think we're going to see, a lot more choice, a lot more variety.
But of course, that brings the question of personal agency right to the center again.
You know, that sounds great in terms of personal development.
Why should managers care about this?
You know, why, you know, as we as individuals weave our, our lives and our work lives, do leaders need to change their mindset to appreciate that and absorb that?
Or, you know, how should leaders respond to this?
And, you know, what way is this in the interest of managers who are trying to run a business?
Yeah, well, I just ran a pilot program this year with three very large companies, with the executives from three large companies.
And the question is 10 week program.
And the question was, how do we think about supporting longer lives?
And Actually, the results of that program were really sort of fascinating because what it showed, well, the first thing it showed is that there is real burnout going out in 40-year-olds.
In fact, I wrote an hbr.org piece about this, the sort of pivotal 40s.
So if you're a manager and you're worried about burnout in your 40s, you need to be worried about longevity because what's happening is people are getting to their 40s and going, Really?
Is this it?
Is this another 20 years of this?
You know, I'm out, either physically or metaphorically out.
And you don't want that.
So I think that it's in your best interest.
Second reason why managers should care about this is that in a time of AI, where AI knows so much, wisdom, networks, judgment are really important.
And that develops with experience, with age.
And I think thirdly, We know there's so many advantages for multi-generational teams to work together.
So there's all sorts of good reasons why you should think about openly about employing people at whatever age they're at and not really thinking too much or worrying too much about are they over 50, are they over 60, are they over 70?
And if you've got a really good performance management system, you can do that.
So at London Business School, for example, we have a couple of...
faculty who teach into their 80s.
Why are they there?
Well, in part because we have a feedback system with our students where every student has to rate every professor at the end of the semester.
And that's made public to all of the other professors.
And let me tell you, if you're not really on your game, you don't need anyone to tell you that.
And so as long as you have really good performance management, people know whether they're still performing, you don't need to use age as a proxy.
Right.
You probably also have tenure, though, that is part of the explanation.
Yeah, we do have tenure, and that is part of the explanation.
But actually, I think that pride is even, well, not always, in every case, but often pride beats tenure.
So you mentioned AI, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are thinking about, wait, wait, wait, wait, AI, maybe this all makes sense, but AI changes everything.
You know, our assumption has been AI wipes out entry-level work.
it wipes out a lot of other work.
And the conversation shifts to, you know, instead of this sort of work ethic that you talked about, that maybe we redefine the definition of happiness in life, which is not necessarily I derive happiness and satisfaction from work, but maybe there's another measurement and maybe I work less and have hobbies more and, you know, and because AI is doing all the work.
How do you think about how AI changes, accelerates, decelerates the phenomenon you're writing about?
When I was naming the eight threads and certainly the four threads of productivity, I created the thread called amplification, which I certainly wouldn't have had 10 years ago.
And the amplification is the thread that connects us to AI, you know, that actually brings like, you know, brings us together.
And, you know, what we know about AI right now, but of course this will change, is that if you're experienced and have good judgment, it will increase your productivity by six times.
So one of the questions we have to ask, as you're saying now, is, well, if I'm going to be six times more productive, what do I do with all that time?
And how do I spend it?
Do I just do more of the same or do I do different things?
And the threads in a way, particularly the nurture threads like adventure and calm, are a real invitation to do things differently.
I think the second thing about AI is that we can anticipate that a proportion of our jobs will be taken by AI every year.
And so weaving the fabric, is a lot better than running up a career ladder.
Because when you're weaving a fabric, you're already transitioning, pivoting.
You've already got self-awareness.
You're already thinking about what do I need?
Who am I?
Where am I?
What are the promises I want to make to my future self?
So it's a much more robust way of thinking about a life and thinking of simply as a career ladder.
So I want to ask you for really practical advice.
Starting with individuals, what are some first steps people can take to start thinking about all of this in a healthy way?
And when I say all of this, it is you are likely to live longer than you have imagined.
You're likely to be productive, maybe longer than you had anticipated.
And your future...
You know, happiness and self-worth sort of depends on getting this right.
What are some of the first things people can do right now?
Well, I think the first thing they can do, as you suggest, is actually acknowledge that they could live to 100.
That's a big first step.
Secondly, you can really ask yourself, where am I now?
One of the things I did with a book is to build a diagnostic to help people work that out.
You can go to the website, it's freely available, and you can download your report.
Because I do think knowing where you are now is really important.
So, for example, in my case, when I started working on this, I realized that my thread of friendship was pretty fragile.
I'd spent so much time working, building mastery.
And it really made me think, okay, if I want to live to 100 and have a great life, I know friendship's really important.
And that leads to the third point, which is to say, small actions and experiments.
I don't think anyone pivots.
You know, I couldn't say today, okay, I'm going to have a great friend by tomorrow.
But what I could do is to say, you know, I could talk to one of my friends this evening for eight minutes.
It turns out it's only eight minutes you need.
And I'll promise myself to do that.
Or else I could say, you know, I'm not feeling very calm at the moment.
I'm going to go for a walk tomorrow morning.
What I'm saying is that you actually commit to things that are going to be useful for you in the future.
I know those are things like friendship, calm, having an adventure, building a skill.
These are all relatively small things that you can start.
So I would say start now and choose something that's going to help you that lasts into the future.
I mean, are you positing that there's a trade-off maybe between, you know, working all out when you're earlier in your career versus patient yourself and planning for the long haul?
Well, I think, you know, the one thing that I feel, and this comes from teaching students for almost 40 years now, I wouldn't really judge what anyone does with their lives.
I mean, some people are going to just really go for it and some people won't.
But I think it comes back to this question about self-awareness, really.
If you're really working on your productivity threads, you know, you're building mastery, you're working with loads of people, you've got your AI really working for you, you know a great deal, there's four threads of productivity.
If you're really focusing all your effort on that, then you have to acknowledge that your other threads, the nurture threads, you know, about your friendship, your calm, they're probably becoming fragile.
You need to think about what you're going to do about that.
And so I think, you know, the wonder of a long life is we can all live it in our own ways.
And I've sort of stopped making judgment calls about how other people live their lives.
But I do think we need to, in terms of personal agency, take responsibility for how we're living our life and the implications of that.
What I've noticed in the diagnostics, lots of people have already completed it, that people in their 40s are saying the weakest thread I have is calm.
And what could I do to bring more reflection into my life?
And that's a question we could ask at any stage in our life.
Yeah, well, you write that people should revisit some of these questions repeatedly throughout their lives.
Yeah.
What are the signals that it's time to revisit yourself and ask those questions again?
Well...
You know, for me, it just happened three years ago when I was walking actually in France and just feeling really down.
And I'm wondering myself, what the hell is going on here?
Why am I walking and crying?
You know, walking and crying.
We've all done that.
And I think it's, you know, it could be a moment like that when you think, I have no idea why I'm doing this.
I talked to someone earlier today and they said, you know, I just got on the Northern Line, which is one of the undergrounds in London.
And I'm thinking to myself, have I got to really do this for the next 20 years?
So I think your body tells you when it's time to ask yourself those three questions, the three guiding questions in the book, which are, who am I?
Where am I now?
And what actions can I take now and promises to my future self?
So, yeah, walking and crying, driving and crying is a red flag for me.
Oh, it's your driving and crying.
Driving and crying, yeah.
I can't drive and cry.
If I cry, I've got to stop.
Oh, no, no.
Okay, driving and crying.
Yes.
Think about it.
Now, crying on an airplane doesn't count.
Oh, no, everybody.
There are atmospheric things that make us all.
Everybody cries.
Yeah, I agree.
We can't count the aircraft crying, but we can certainly walk and cry or drive and cry.
Yeah.
All right.
So back to the kind of practical advice, again, from a kind of executive level, from a leadership perspective, you know, you feel like managers, first of all, there are tons of layoffs out there these days.
A lot of the hiring I see is people trying to bring in, you know, starting level people who are AI conversant, who've grown up with it, who know what to do with it.
I mean, it doesn't necessarily...
On the surface, augur well for, you know, an older workforce that is trying to take agency in their career.
What are ways that executives should think about everything you're talking about in ways that, you know, benefit the company by engaging with people, you know, who are going to be, who have the potential to be productive in their 70s, 80s, 90s even?
First of all, Adi, I absolutely agree with you that this is a very tough labour market.
It's tough for people who are young, it's tough for the middle people and it's tough for old ones.
So I don't want to be Pollyanna about any of this and say, look, there's this sort of magic bullet or magic pill that's going to somehow make everybody, make it right for everyone because it is really tough.
I mean, I have kids in their 30s.
I feel it.
You know, I think many of us do who are listening right now.
It's the adult to adult, really, point I would make, which is to say, you've got to take control of your working life.
Nobody else is going to do it for you.
You know, the marvel about the parent-child is the parent took control for you.
And they might not have done a great job of it, and they probably didn't, but at least they pretended to.
But they're not doing that anymore now.
And I think you've got to decide what sort of working life you want.
And also understand...
where the world is going and what skills you might need.
For example, we know that AI is going to take 20% of the tasks you currently do.
So you've got to think about, well, what tasks do I do that AI isn't going to be able to do?
How could I become more human?
And we know that being more human is about the relationships you build, the friendships you build, the judgment you have, the way you think about information, the way you think about knowledge, the adventures that you have, the stories that you have.
I mean, AI...
I know it does a marvelous job of telling stories, but we all know it isn't a storyteller.
It's humans who are storytellers.
So I think we are in an enormous transition.
You know, I'm in my 70s.
We've been around a long time.
I've talked about, I've written about work now for 50 years.
This is a truly astonishing moment to be.
at work and it does require us to really reimagine what it is we want from work and what organizations are there to do.
I ran a pilot with three companies, executives from three companies that went over 10 weeks.
We transcribed everything they said to each other.
And these are the three things that really came out in terms of the new way that they were thinking about their careers when they realized more about who they were and what was happening to the world.
Number one, they really understood that you've got to prepare before you need to.
You know, there's no point in letting yourself get burnt out.
prepare before you need to.
Number two, commit to what lasts.
For example, friendship is something that's going to last.
Mastering a skill is going to be something that lasts.
So think about your future self when you're making commitments.
And thirdly, protect time for judgment.
You know, if we're saying personal agency is so important, you need time to be able to think.
And all of those executives said, we don't have any time to think.
And the program actually gave them an opportunity to legitimately talk about themselves and talk about their lives and living a hundred year life and thinking about it.
And that for me came out so clearly.
People are yearning to have an opportunity to think and talk to each other about this incredibly important topic.
So I love this optimism.
I love the agency.
You know, again, I feel like institutions, laws, practices have to adapt, you know, because I think age bias, it's not allowed, but it is, or it happens.
It's evident.
It's in front of our face.
It's something companies do all the time.
They shuffle out the older people and they find legal ways to get away with it.
So I think something has to shift in addition to...
the kind of inner sense we have that we want to live these productive lives.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, you know very well, I've written extensively about what organizations should do.
I wrote redesigning work.
It was one of your covers a couple of years back.
That was a good one.
Yeah.
That was a nice one.
So it's not that we haven't told organizations what they should be doing.
I don't think any company is naive about what they should be doing.
The question is, are they going to do any of those things?
And so what I've decided to do with the next decade of my life is, you know, just to show what the benefits are when you encourage people to think about the fabric of their life, to help people develop personal agency.
And we're launching at London Business School, an institute for longevity, work and careers.
And that also will do that.
So I do feel as if there's a sea change.
And it takes institutions an awfully long time to move.
But there's a lot of really positive signs.
You know, you see people working into their 60s and 70s and looking, you know, being great.
You see freelancers building, you see dads taking paternity leave, all the things that you hadn't seen before are now beginning to come.
And so...
It's good news for everybody.
It gives us more freedom, more variety.
All right.
Well, we'll have to get you back in your 90s, maybe for your centennial, to give us some perspective.
But Linda, thank you for the conversation.
Thank you so much, Adi.
Thank you.
That was Linda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, founder of HSM Advisory, and author of Living the 100-Year Life, How to Build a Career That Lasts and a Life You Love.
Next week, Allison digs into how we can better leverage indirect influence in our organizations.
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I'm Adi Ignatius.