Charles Handy

Only one firm can be the industry leader, only one country top economically, there are richer or more successful neighbors to compare ourselves with. Competition is healthy, maybe even essential, but there has to be more to life than winning or we should nearly all be losers. Charles Handy Irish academic and author Born 1932

Breakthrough ideas
Shamrock and federal organizations Future of work

Key books
Understanding Organizations The Age of Unreason The Empty Raincoat (aka The Age of Paradox) The Ultimate Business Guru Book 86 Charles Handy (born 1932) is a bestselling writer and broadcaster. In his quiet and undemonstrative way, Handy has established himself as one of the most mainstream and important of business thinkers. His work is accessible and popular. Because of this it is dismissed by some He has an unerring tendency to state the obvious, which is ironically one of his strengths , noted one magazine.1 Yet Handy has brought major questions about the future of work and of society onto the corporate and personal agenda. Irish-born, Charles Handy worked for Shell until 1972 when he left to teach at London Business School. He spent time at MIT where he came into contact with many of the leading lights in the human relations school of thinking including Ed Schein. Handys early academic career was conventional. His first book, Understanding Organizations (1976), gives little hint of the wide-ranging social and philosophical nature of his later work. It is a comprehensive and readable primer of organizational theory, which was written as much to clarify Handys own perspectives on the subject. From there Handy moved on to the more typically idiosyncratic Gods of Management (1978). The Gods identified by Handy were Apollo (order and rules); Athena (task-oriented); Dionysus (individualistic); and Zeus (one dominant leader). It was in 1989 with the publication of The Age of Unreason that Handys thinking made a great leap forward. The age of unreason, which Handy predicts, is a time when what we used to take for granted may no longer hold true, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped, by us and for us; a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold. A time therefore for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable. Suddenly the world mapped out by Handy became an uncertain and dangerous one. The future will be one of discontinuous change (a phrase which has now entered the mainstream). The path through time, with society slowly, naturally and radically improving on a steady course, is a thing of the past. The blinkers have to be removed. Handy tells the story of the Peruvian Indians who saw invading ships on the horizon. Having no knowledge of such things, they discounted them as a freak of the weather. They settled for their sense of continuity. Charles Handy 87 In order to adapt to a society in which mysterious invaders are perpetually on the

horizon, the way people think will have to change fundamentally. This is where Handy begins to offer challenges to his audience. We all accept his arguments that things are changing, but not necessarily that we ourselves need to change. We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything, says Handy. He points out that people who have thought unconventionally, unreasonably, have had the most profound impact on twentieth-century living. Freud, Marx and Einstein succeeded through discontinuous (or what Handy labels upside down) thinking. In practice, Handy believes that certain forms of organization will become dominant. These are the type of organization most readily associated with service industries. First and most famously, what he calls the shamrock organization a form of organization based around a core of essential executives and workers supported by outside contractors and part-time help. The consequence of such an organizational form is that organizations in the future are likely to resemble the way consultancy firms, advertising agencies and professional partnerships are currently structured. The second emergent structure identified by Handy is the federal one. It is not, he points out, another word for decentralization. He provides a blueprint for federal organizations in which the central function co-ordinates, influences, advises and suggests. It does not dictate terms or short-term decisions. The center is, however, concerned with long-term strategy. It is at the middle of things and is not a polite word for the top or even for head office. The third type of organization Handy anticipates is what he calls the Triple I. The three Is are Information, Intelligence and Ideas. In such organizations the demands on personnel management are large. Explains Handy: The wise organization already knows that their smart people are not to be easily defined as workers or as managers but as individuals, as specialist, as professional or executives, or as leader (the older terms of manager and worker are dropping out of use), and that they and it need also to be obsessed with the pursuit of learning if they are going to keep up with the pace of change. The Ultimate Business Guru Book 88 Discontinuity demands new organizations, new people to run them with new skills, capacities and career patterns. No one will be able to work simply as a manager; organizations will demand much more. As organizations change in the age of unreason so, Handy predicts, will other aspects of our lives. Less time will be spent at work 50,000 hours in a lifetime rather than the present figure of around 100,000. Handy does not predict, as people did in the 1970s, an enlightened age of leisure. Instead he challenges people to spend more time thinking about what they want to do. Time will not simply be divided between work and play there could be portfolios which spilt time between fee work (where you sell time); gift work (for neighbors or charities), study (keeping up-to-date with your work) and homework and leisure. Handy continues to champion the federal organization, an old idea whose time may have come. The federal organization allows units and divisions individual independence while preserving corporate unity. Through federalism Handy believes the modern company can bridge some of the paradoxes it continually faces such as the need to be simultaneously global and local. Handy also continues gently to pose awkward questions. We must consider what sort of jobs, what sort of companies, what sort of capitalism, what sort of society, what sort of education and what sort of life we want. And, more worryingly, there are no easy answers; perhaps there are no bold generic answers at all. Handy has reached his own conclusions. He says he has made his last speech to a large audience. He now sets a limit to his audiences of 12, reflecting that enough is enough. Handy has become a one-man case study of the new world of work he so successfully and humanely commentates on. At a personal level, he appears to have

the answers. Whether these can be translated into answers for others remains the question and the challenge.