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 in 1975 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…. 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".
