Last Friday I chatted to two former colleagues who had, between them, spent over 70 years on the FT. They had come into the office for the annual pensioners' lunch. The lunch is an opportunity for retired journalists to meet, and for those still here to shake hands with mentors who guided them through their early years.

Not many people work for the same company for that long these days. Not many companies survive long enough to allow them to. In his book The Living Company, Arie de Geus, a former Shell executive, said that a third of the companies in the 1970 Fortune 500 list had disappeared 13 years later. The average life expectancy of a multinational company - a Fortune 500 company or its non-US equivalent - was 40 to 50 years.