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".
