This speculative essay offers an interpretation of the ways in which a particular world-historical narrative underlies the content of mainstream management and business curricula. Through a dialogue with the Carnegie Report of 2011, we argue that management education contains a strong programme regarding the “time ahead” despite the common-place accusation of being ahistorical, detached from the broader social and political themes and crises of our times. Contrary to the Report’s findings, we suggest that this particular historical narrative emerging both from the classical technical disciplines, but also from newer themes established as core axes of interpretation of the world, advances a temporalisation of history based upon the key concept of perfectibility. The theme of perfectibility functions as the basis for understanding the past, the present and the future as the endless circularity and improved repetition of a global managerial and business framework through which historical time is appropriated as “the time of business” itself.