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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Charles Handy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Handy. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

A Salute to exemplary writing

Charles Handy has been one of the few writers who has really touched and inspired me on my journey of the past 40 odd years. The first book of his I became aware of was “Understanding Organisations” (1976) - written after 5 years’ experience of helping establish the country’s first business school and was indeed one of the few books on management available in Britain at the time. When the huge new Strathclyde Region set up a small group to review its departmental structure, the Chief Executive gave us a Peter Drucker paperback to give u.s ideas – it was the only paperback on the subject available….  

Handy’s “Understanding Organisations” came a year later and was written for the practising executive – management “students” didn’t exist then! Unlike the humility and moral power in Handy’s writing, technical smartness and artifice are the basic features of most management books. His next book - “Gods of Management” (1978) was a shorter one which told the story of the 4 types of organisational culture. It was a superb read and was reflected in presentations I subsequently did in Central Asia in the early 2000s to help officials set the “one-man management” principle they were familiar with against alternative systems…. 

I have just been rereading his little autobiography - Myself – and other more important matters which is so delightful and thought-provoking and has such a superb review here by someone who knew him that I thought I would reproduce it in its entirety 

If we have any British management gurus, Charles Handy must head the list, although he doesn’t really like being called a guru. This book is the nearest we shall get to his autobiography, including, as it does, much of his understanding of key management issues. He describes himself as a social philosopher, weighing up the social implications of management and employment matters. We also meet him in this book as a humble person, who, while knowing that he has something to offer, doesn’t “think of himself more highly than he should”.

As well as many insights into a life well lived, there is much food for thought here about life/work balance, about career paths which emerge rather than get chosen, about how experience teaches us, about the purpose of a business, about the way in which our identity is shaped and success is defined. 

Career philosophy

Charles Handy traces his career from early life in an Irish Anglican vicarage, to classical scholar at Cambridge, to Shell executive struggling in the jungles of Borneo, to business school professor, to public figure and broadcaster, traveller and world circuit lecturer. But as in most careers there is a great deal of the unplanned and unexpected in it. We also meet some of the non-public Charles Handy and see him wrestling with personal dilemmas and the implications that we all have different personae, depending on the circumstances of time and place. What is identity? Do we remain the same person throughout our lives? For example, was he the same person at work as the one his family knew at home? 

One of the problems of being a manager is that you may be required to try to change what a person really is to what the company or institution wants. For this reason Handy inclines to the view that we should not mix friendship and work zones. Also personality tests, while not devoid of meaning, should be treated with some reserve, because we do change through life and we are usually a mix depending on situations which arise. As he reflects on his experiences, Handy sees that his genetic inheritance did not determine his actions and that if you care passionately about something you discover elements within yourself which you didn’t realise were there and which get filled out under the pressure of experience. The influence of his wife, Elizabeth, herself a professional photographer, is credited with making him more of a “connector” and “salesperson” than he would otherwise have been.

One could say that Handy believes that success does not come from knowing where you want to go. Rather by action, experimentation, questioning and re-acting we discover who and what we are.  This might help us to a sense of reality when we read these “how to” books that give a clear guide on how to plan and implement your career. He doubts whether even now he really knows who he is; he quotes T.S.Eliot “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” 

Early development

Charles Handy looks at the various stages of his life in terms of their relevance to making him what he became and, indeed, what he is. He grew up in an Irish society where there was little social mixing between Catholics and Protestants, though there was little overt hostility in his early experience. His family, whose forebears had lived in Ireland for 300 years,  was part of the Anglo-Irish community which has now largely vanished from the Republic of Ireland.  Regardless of the religious divide, and in spite of an upbringing which deeply respected the British monarchy, he never ceased to feel Irish; after 40 years in England, Handy does not really know whether he is English or Irish in his inner self, though temperamentally, he says, he lacks the Irish gregariousness.

Ireland as the fourth richest country in the world by per capita income has moved on, economically and culturally since he left, but he regrets that many aspects of life which had an Irish charm have diminished. He muses on the mixed blessing which globalisation brings and wonders whether the seductions of consumerism and the pulling apart of old communities have been for the best. He speaks of a seminar he and his wife ran in Dublin where participants expressed regret that good features, like the friendliness, the sense of timelessness, the easy-going life with the family as the centre, had gone, as well as the factors that were not so good like extremes of poverty, false religiosity and island mentality. In all this, Handy is looking back from where he is now; not at what he would have perceived as he was growing up.

So also in relation to his education; he went to Oxford as a classicist, having attained good pre-university Latin and Greek, by a series of fortuitous circumstances rather than by design. Frequently he refers back to his university experience as he sees its effect on his career. He quickly realised that he was being exposed to a different form of education from anything he had previously met. In his first week, his tutor asked him to prepare an essay on “What is Truth?” – this initiated him into a different intellectual world.

Languages per se did not attract him, but they opened the doors to the study of the great philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. He was learning to think rigorously and rationally. Plato left him with the awareness that so much of what we think of as reality is but our perception of reality. In later years he found this a valuable understanding in the teaching of management. (Perhaps this is why business schools like Dartmouth and Aspen have included in their programmes a course for managers and their spouses on the great thinkers of all ages.) Handy learnt that the world was not a simple place; he became a habitual sceptic or at least a thoughtful person. 

The Greek philosophers anticipated many of our current problems; Socrates probed underlying assumptions. Handy finds that using a series of “Why? questions” often gets to the heart of a matter. Aristotle’s Golden Mean – not too much or too little of anything – has influenced his choices in life, which have not been to be as rich as possible. Aristotle had a lot to say about eudaimonia, a Greek word, often translated as happiness, but which really means doing your best with what you are best at, which, with its ethical undertone, is more profound than “optimising your core competences”.

Handy muses on his time at university, that education is not passing on to the new generation what has worked in the past; it is not a matter of merely memorising the great minds of the past and regurgitating the results at exam time. He learnt the value of talking in learning, quoting an Irish saying, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?” He looks back on university as a time of learning to think cogently and coherently and applying the reasoning to all aspects of life. “The proof of the educational pudding is in much later life.” 

Handy’s early business career

He wanted to see the world and have a wide range of experience and got a job with Shell whose interviewer told him “You have a well trained, but empty mind; we’ll fill it with useful knowledge”.  There followed two 3-year tours of duty as an executive in South East Asia, beginning as an economist in Singapore, where he got himself started by reading a little book Teach Yourself Economics. Quite soon he was subjected to development by immersion – “throw them in and they will have to learn to swim”. His main activity was in Borneo, devoid of roads and Western amenities, where travel was mainly by alligator infested rivers and where he had just one expatriate assistant to help him administer a vast area of oil activity. 

It was no good merely working by the manuals. You learnt as you went along, especially by mistakes. It was obvious that “warehoused learning” wasn’t going to be of much use. Getting the right people was the most significant road to success. He was not really happy with the Borneo experience; it did not give him the outlet for his personality that he needed. There was scope for making mistakes from which you could learn if you were honest in your subsequent reflection; this remained valuable for the rest of his life. But a career with a big multinational was not for him.

He came back to London where he was given a non-job, which taught him that to be under-loaded can be more destructive than over-loaded. He had no positive responsibility, but plenty of negative responsibility. He could stop things happening, and from this he learned to understand why people lacking positive responsibility could be obstructive, such as the official who refuses a planning application without reason, or the airline employee who closes the gate just as you are rushing up, the waiter who ignores you and so on. For some, it is the only way they can create meaning in what they do. 

Handy was then transferred to the Shell Management Training College and felt he had found his vocation in preparing managers for their next assignments. But in a short time he was required to leave that and prepare to go to Liberia. So he sat down and wrote his letter of resignation, not knowing what would happen and after only a year or so of married life. Elizabeth, his wife, receives frequent mention in the book. They have been real partners who complemented each other. Her drive and skill as a connector with people has been a major contribution to his own success. 

The turning point

Behind the scenes, someone who had been observing him in Shell initiated a situation as a result of which in 1965 he was offered a post at the new London Business School, which led to a full professorship, without all the normal procedures. He became responsible for the Sloan Management Programme in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the development of which he spent a year in the USA and found himself enlivened by the flexibility and energy he experienced there – an attitude that the future is ours to create and that initiative should be encouraged, that anything is possible if you care enough. 

The move to London Business School was the turning point in his life which ultimately led to the Charles Handy we know. He comments on the way in which people can influence your path in life and reflects on the opportunity that the work he was then embarking on gave scope to influence others. He talks, from the receiving end, of the chance remark which can have momentous consequences, helping people to believe in themselves. In contrast, he recalls cases where some managers seemed to think that if they were not actively and negatively criticising people that should be enough to indicate satisfaction with performance. He advocates the sowing of seeds in the right quarters which can create opportunity for people to progress; also seeds can be sown in their own minds which can lead to personal development and seeing the right openings.

Whilst he enjoyed and valued his year at MIT, he subsequently realised that, in one sense, he had no real need to have gone. Most of the value of his learning experience lay in the fact that what he knew intuitively and implicitly became explicit and useable. (I found myself very responsive to Handy’s thought here. When teaching I often say to the participants that I will not tell them anything they don’t already know – only they don’t know they know it.)

At MIT and in his work at London Business School, Charles Handy learnt to see management as a practical art, rather than as an applied science. It requires ingenuity, imagination and character. Beyond analytical skill it requires insight; concepts emerge from experience rather then preceding it. He humorously suggests that the MBA programme ought often to be called “Master of Business Analysis”, for this is what the daily working on case studies at many business schools leads to. Like Henry Mintzberg,  Handy emphasises that learning about management should take place in tandem with practical experience – a kind of apprenticeship process.

Consultancy and banking firms tend to value the analytical skills, but if you are a practical manager, you require people skills, perseverance, courage, an ethical stance, self-knowledge – a range of awareness encapsulated nowadays under the term “emotional intelligence”. The teaching at London Business School in its early stages was not based on this perception, but Charles Handy tried to introduce ethical awareness by the study of the Greek classic Antigone, where the main character was torn asunder by a clash of loyalties. After a trial run he had to drop it. 

This concern to emphasise practical management led in 1981 to his involvement in the Open University programme "The Effective Manager". He wrote much of the home study text and was able to marry classroom material to the realities which the students would be facing in their daily work life. They were earning while learning. The programme developed into the Open University MBA programme which now has some 3000 students, more than any other business school in Europe. (Perhaps I might be allowed a comment that the Ashridge MBA programmes and its consultancy services share the Handy philosophy and even earned a pat on the back from Mintzberg.)

This experience of business school teaching in 1987 led to Charles Handy’s role as chairing the production of the report The Making of Managers, in which he proposed a two-part MBA programme, the first, in the classroom on the language of management, and the second, part-time and related to current experience and involving mentors from the participants’ organisations. It did not catch on immediately, but its influence is perhaps seen in the later proliferation of part time programmes for working executives. 

A new direction

We have jumped ahead and have to return to a sad, yet transforming experience in Charles’ life. His father, a 74 year old retired vicar in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), died unexpectedly. People from all over Ireland flocked to the funeral, a testimony to a quiet but deeply concerned life to which many owed much. Handy saw into the depths of purpose and meaning in life and resolved to do something more meaningful than climbing career ladders.

He consulted two bishops as to his prospects of entering the priesthood. They felt the rough and tumble of parish life would not suit him, even if he might make a good bishop ultimately. However they knew that there was a vacancy coming up as warden of St George’s House, Windsor Castle. This is a “college” within the grounds of the castle, just by the beautiful St George’s Chapel, where some surplus accommodation was taken over to enable training courses for the clergy to be run and where, also, especially at weekends, what were called “consultations” took place. 

The consultations gathered together people from all walks of life, who might have a contribution to make to working through the social dilemmas of our time. (I was privileged to attend a number of them under the wardenship of Charles Handy’s successors. They are unforgettable, mind-stretching occasions in unique surroundings. The ideas shared are usually summarised to contribute to the literature of the particular theme.) Out of these consultations grew the writing of Charles Handy on the Future of Work. The little summary of the consultations on that theme is still the best piece of writing on the topic, which he has developed further in works like "The Age of Unreason" and "The Empty Raincoat". 

Particularly he has popularised the idea of a portfolio life. The four components of the portfolio life are “paid work” (fee or waged work), “gift work” (voluntary), “study work” and “home work”. These may operate simultaneously. An associated concept is that at different stages of life one may be a core employee of a company, a contracted specialist, a part time worker or freelance. No longer is work a matter of a lifetime of 40 years or more with one firm. Rather there is the freedom to move through a variety of work experiences without having to be subject to the lifelong discipline of being a fulltime employee. And with this approach is the opportunity to go on sharing, even into old age, any wisdom one has acquired. 

In taking on the work at St George’s, Handy dropped his salary considerably and had to watch the pennies, yet felt that in other ways he was enriched and a wider world was opened to him by which he has been led into paths he could never have sat down and planned. He was uplifted by the spiritual elements of the experience of being associated with the royal chapel, with its contrasts between the pomp of human prowess and the humility of service. He is what he calls a cultural Christian; not strong on the formal doctrines, though powerfully affected by the underlying significance of the Biblical stories, finding in the spiritual experience of St George’s a peace and sense of values which will always be with him and which is reflected in the regular talks he has given for the BBC on the Thought for the Day programme. (Some of these are gathered together in a little book Thoughts for the Day.)

The search for deeper meaning which was prompted by his father’s death took a step forward when he felt he ought to apply the principles of the portfolio life to himself. So when his stint at Windsor ended he did not seek formal employment but decided to become a freelance, no longer imprisoned by organisational life, but ready to follow the path as it emerged. 

Living the portfolio life

There was considerable risk involved in going freelance. He was a successful author, though not all his works sold well, and now there would be no monthly cheque coming in. With the full support of his wife, the next phase of life’s adventure started for him and them.  We have already referred to some of his activities in the early part of his new life – with the Open University and “The Making of Managers”. But for the first few years there was also some anxiety about whether the income would be there to pay the bills. Activities like being the chair of the Royal Society of Arts would not have sufficed, though they were good for his image. (A thought he would not have welcomed, feeling uneasy about self promotion; his wife became his agent eventually and she had fewer inhibitions about ensuring that some of his value was recognised in a practical way.)

However, had he allowed the risks to dominate his thinking he would have been the poorer and so would all of us who have been influenced by his writings. But one is glad that he shares in this book the difficulties of ensuring a roof over their heads, ensuring that cash was coming in and taking care of the education of two teenage children. He did a lot of lecturing. Indeed it was in this period this author first met him at Ashridge and saw for ourselves the humility of a man whose fame was spreading. He discovered during this period that if you “care deeply about what you are doing, then nothing else matters too much”.

In time, he and his wife achieved a good measure of professional stability. How they have organised their portfolio lives makes fascinating reading. He undertook world lecture tours on which she joined him, and they rationed them to enable them to gain pleasure and experience from them, which was of greater value to life than accepting all the offers he received and the money that would have gone with them. They also planned how many days they would work on their two professions and on how many they could enjoy their freedom, with an allocation for voluntary work. They worked separately, yet with a deep interest in what the other was doing. He also became an accomplished cook. 

Their experiences of living within their means, particularly in the early days of the freelance phase, also caused him to reflect upon how the consumer society is not satisfied with enough, but is always seeking more and more. It is said that the goods on offer add to your power of choice. But what is the value of such a bewildering range of choices in the absence of a criterion of choice? They simply add stress. Handy refers to Adam Smith’s view that while economic growth was obviously a good thing, making life easier for everyone, too much of it for too long would result in a surfeit of unnecessary things. But Handy, as a social philosopher, also asks whether we have the right to determine for others what is necessary and what merely clutters up the streets with discarded packaging. He also recognises that all these luxuries create work for others. So he gets us questioning rather than providing unambiguous answers. 

Thoughts on capitalism

His experiences linked with his social philosopher role led him into some thoughts on capitalism (more fully dealt with in his book The Hungry Spirit). At one stage by a variety of circumstances he and his wife found themselves the owners of three homes, which made him feel guilty. He felt that the business culture may have become distorted. He evinces reservations about the American culture “that argued that the market was king, that the shareholder always had priority, that business was the key engine of progress, and that, as such, its needs should prevail in all policy decisions.” He considers that what is called for is to retain the energy of capitalism without its flaws.

Shareholders tend not to be owners in the sense of taking a pride in their property; more often they are just investors or even punters. They are there for the money. But if money is the purpose of business activity, it is like living to eat instead of eating to live. “The purpose of a business is not to make a profit, full stop. It is to make a profit in order to enable it to do something more or better. What that something is, becomes the real justification for the existence of the business.” He quotes a speech by the head of a large MNC, stressing that all the stakeholders benefit from a profitable business. Handy agrees, so long as the benefits are fairly balanced. 

In his concluding remarks Handy looks back over his life experiences and asks questions such as why do we need such big organisations when most of us don’t relish working in them. While he approves of the open market, carefully regulated, as a means of making the world a better place, he regrets that the phrase about making the world a better place is often missing from the capitalist narrative. Capitalism too often takes selfishness to be its driving force, where dog eats dog. Yet he believes that there is an altruistic gene in most of us. Why then when reporting their yearly results do companies tend to report the results just for themselves, rather than including the results for the customers or the world at large? 

We can let him sum up his social philosophy:

"I believe that organisations are, in a broad sense, the servants of society. They exist to provide us with the things and services we need or want. We rely on them to do so efficiently and effectively. Ideally, their interests and ours should coincide, but they will prosper most if they define their purpose as something bigger than themselves". 

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Lessons from a Life

 Charles Handy has been one of the few writers who has really touched and inspired me on my journey of the past 40 odd years.

It’s not easy to describe his appeal - since he is best known as Britain’s most eminent management guru and such people are normally publicity-seeking charlatans (see Huczyinski (1993) and Micklewait and Wooldridge)

Handy’s first book “Understanding Organisations” (1976) was written after 5 years’ experience of helping establish the country’s first business school and was indeed one of the few books on management available in Britain at the time. When the huge new Strathclyde Region set up a small group to review its departmental structure, the Chief Executive gave us a Peter Drucker paperback to give us ideas – it was the only paperback on the subject available….  “Understanding Organisations”  was written for the practising executive – management “students” didn’t exist then! There is an artificiality and technical smartness in the writing of management textbooks – but a humility and moral power in Handy’s writing. 

His next book - “Gods of Management” (1978) – was a shorter one which told the story of the 4 types of organisational culture. It was a superb read and was reflected in presentations I subsequently did in Central Asia in the early 2000s to help officials set the “one-man management” principle they were familiar with against alternative systems….

And Handy had a rare knack for anticipating the future – somehow he’s able to peer into the tea-leaves and help us make sense of the new worlds are emerging and to do so in the most crystal-clear and elegant of language. He did this first in The Future of Work (1984) when he coined the phrase “portfolio work” to describe how our careers in future would be a mixture of time-limited projects and also invented (in "The Age of Unreason” 1989) the phrase “shamrock organisations” to describe the form the organisations of the future would take – the (small number) of core workers; those on contract; and part-time workers. His books have had an increasingly chatty approach – helped probably by his experience of doing a lot of “Thought for the Day” pieces for the BBC which taught him, he says, to compress his thoughts into 450 words or so. For a very graceful assessment of Handy’s role and significance see this article

He’s reached the advanced age of 88 – and I was delighted to discover, on a recent visit to the little English bookshop in the nearby park, that he produced last year a little book 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges. It takes the format of short epistles for his grandchildren - summing up what he feels he’s learned about life.

It’s such a delightful read that, for my own benefit, I felt I needed to make a note of the main points of each of the chapters

Chapter Title 

 Key Points

Things Will Be Different

 

List of some key words whose meanings have changed dramatically in a lifetime (“chip used to be piece of wood or fried potato”) and the scale of change in that period – not least work. We are now “Creatives, Carers or Custodians”

The Human Imperative

 

But the really big issues and questions don’t change.

“Trust but verify”

Life’s Biggest Question

 

Emerson’s advice – “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded”

Doing the best you can with what you’re best at

God or What?

 

In the new diversity, can we tell right from wrong?

Aristotle has twelve virtues: 1) Courage – bravery and the willingness to stand up for what you think is right; 2) Temperance – self-control and restraint; 3) Liberality – kindness, charity and generosity; 4) Magnificence – radiance, joie de vivre; 5) Pride – satisfaction in achievement; 6) Honour – respect, reverence, admiration; 7) Good Temper – equanimity, level-headedness; 8) Friendliness – conviviality and sociability;  9) Truthfulness – straightforwardness, frankness and candour; 10) Wit – sense of humour; 11) Friendship – camaraderie and companionship; 12) Justice – impartiality and fairness

Everyone Can Be Wrong

 

Closed and open answers; Galileo and Copernicus; Handy’s portfolio/clover idea – and the initial reaction against it

Curiosity Does not Kill the Cat

Travel with curiousity in your backpack

How Clever Are You?

 

Different ideas on the subject (Howard Gardiner). Schools have a strange notion

“I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who” (Kipling).

Life Is a Marathon not a Horse Race

Defects of competition; Be your own master

Who You Are Matters more than What You Do

His wife photographs subjects with 5 objects to illustrate their different identities. Idea of “street wisdom”

Keep It Small

 

Edmund Burke’s “small platoons” Robin Dunbar’s organisations of no more than 150 and key groups of 5, 15 and 45. Federal systems best

You Are not a Human Resource

Pity Drucker used the management word – “work should be organised; things managed and people led”

You and Society

 

Complicated letter – suggesting we have excessive regulations; that rep democracy should be upheld

Life’s Changing Curves

 

We should start afresh before we are forced to

Enough Is as Good as a Feast

The Bushmen had a 15 hour week – the money poisoned everything (Rousseau)

Handy separate NEEDS from WANTS (concept of free work)

It’s the Economy, Stupid

 

His father’s “stipend”; His wife’ separation of “investment” from “consumption” “Money and fulfilment are uneasy bedfellows”

‘We’ Beats ‘I’ all the Time

If there is a common purpose; Never take friendship for granted

When Two Become One

He confesses to selfishness in how he treated his wife

What You Can’t Count Matters More Than What You Can

“McNamara fallacy” means that mush of life gets pushed into 3rd or 4th place.. eg love, hope, kindness, courage, honesty and loyalty

The Last Quarter

 

future generations can look forward to last 25 years of their life being free of financial worried

You Are Unique

We have 3-5 identities

My Last Words

 

What he recommends for his grandchildren - Learn a foreign language, a musical instrument, a sport (individual better); write a diary and fall in love

Handy's little book inspires me to go back and look again at my draft - since the last version is from June...and is clearly too abstract and impersonal....it's subtitle "a bibliograph's notes" say it all! 

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Memorable Messages

I’ve set myself a rather challenging task – to sift through the 200 plus books which have popped up on my blogposts over the past eight years which relate to what we, rather egocentrically, call “the global crisis”; and to identify those which I would recommend to those members of the younger generation struggling tomake sense of the mess….
It’s challenging because I’m finding that I was too hasty in my reading the first time round – or, if I’m totally frank, that I was too lazy or distracted to do much more than flick the pages….But a trawl like this offers the great advantage of ……."compare and contrast"…

Plus .....I now know (or think I know!) what I’m looking for. A previous post set out some of the prerequisites I now look for in any book and, the more I skim the material I’ve collected, the more ruthless I feel about exploring the question of whether a book has the qualities required to change the way the reader looks at the world…..  
Bear in mind that I bring to the task no fewer than 60 years of quite intensive reading while trying to make sense of (those bits of) the world (I feel I should be making an effort to understand)…..When we do these lists of the century’s “key books”, I often wonder how many the compilers have included from a sense of duty – rather than from a sense of its felt impact…..
And so I did a little test – I asked myself which books had actually so impressed me that I had given them as presents to others or used in my project work of the past 25 years …..The common factor in the resulting list was "typologies" - the books all had a way of simplifying the complexity which faces us...


The typology
Author; source
Further detail
3 incentive types
Etzioni (1971)

Carrots, sticks, norm compliance

8 Roles in any effective team

Belbin (1981)
Plant, resource investigator, coordinator, shaper, monitor, teamworker, implementer, finisher, specialist
10 Rules to stifle innovation

Rosabeth Kantor (in her 1983 book “The Change Masters”
See later
7 Habits of Effective People

See later
Full book available on internet
4 Gods of Management
Charles Handy/Roger Harrison in Gods of Management (1984)

Zeus (boss culture); Appollo ((hierarchy - role culture); Athena (task culture); Dionysus (individual professional)
4 basic interpretive stances

Mary Douglas grid-group theory (1970s); Chris Hood’s “The State of the State”  (2000)


Hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian, fatalist
48 ways to gain power

Robert Greene in “The 48 Laws of Power” (1998)

Link gives access to entire book
6 global threats to capitalism
Susan George in “The Lugano Report – on preserving capitalism in the 21st century” (1999) – a powerful critique in the form of a spoof report produced by consultants for the global elite
Strongly recommend the new Introduction she wrote – accessible on the googlebook link

When I was working in Central Europe in the 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of the Covey book in the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was one of the few books I knew in English which was also available in the local language and was useful as a means of professional conversation. I know that the book is rather frowned upon in intellectual circles but I still think it's got something.....including the famous sketch of a woman which demonstrates so powerfully our disparate perceptions.....
The principles were/are -
- be proactive
- begin with the end in mind
- put first things first
- think win/win
- seek first to understand : then to be understood
- synergise
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit

When I moved to Central Asia and Caucasus in 1999, I found that presentation of Rosabeth Kanter’s “Ten rules for stifling innovation” was a marvellous way to liven up a workshop with middle-ranking officials. 
She had concocted this prescription as a satiric comment on the way she discovered from her research that senior executives in US commercial giants like IBM, General Motors were continuing to act in the old centralised ways despite changed structures and rhetoric.

1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new, and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

“Any of this strike you as similar?” I would cheekily ask my Uzbek and Azeri officials.

Robert Greene’s 24 ways to seduce; 33 ways to conduct war; and 48 Laws of power are, also, tongue in cheek. The first to hit the market was the 48 Laws of power and I enjoyed partly because it so thoroughly challenged in its spirit the gung-ho (and unrealistic) naivety of the preaching which characterised so many of the management books of the time – and partly for the way historical examples are woven into the text. I’ve selected a few to give the reader a sense of the spirit of the book
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies
• Conceal your intentions
• always say less than necessary
• Guard your reputation with your life
• Court attention at all costs
• Get others to do the work, but always take the credit
• Make other people come to you
• Win through your actions, never through argument
• Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victims

I found a Russian translation of the book in Baku and gave it as a leaving gift to the Azeri lawyer in the Presidential Office with whom I had worked closely for 2 years on the project to help implement the Civil Service Law. He obviouly made good use of it as 3 months later he was appointed as Head(Ministerial level)of the new Civil Service Agency my work had helped inspire!

Luther’s 95 theses on the wall of the Wittenberg church may seem excessive – but, given the success of his mission, perhaps contain a lesson for the media advisers who tell us that the public can absorb a limited number of messages only!

Sarah Bakewell suggests in How to Live – or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty attempts at an Answer that Montaigne’s life can usefully be encapsulated in 20 injunctions –
• Don’t worry about death
• Read a lot, forget most of it – and be slow-witted
• Survive love and loss
• Use little tricks
• Question everything
• Keep a private room behind the shop
• Be convivial; live with others
• Wake from the sleep of habit
• Do something no one has done before
• Do a good job – but not too good a job
• Reflect on everything; regret nothing
• Give up control

At the very least, when I see such lists, it suggests we're in for some fun!