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)
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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.
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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.
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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.