Philosopher for a modern age

Charles Handy is a writer and thinker of vision, a chronicler of change, yet his work remains grounded by practical experience, compassion and humour. Now a portfolio worker in his own "third age", Charles Handy has learnt his lessons about purpose and balance. His books have much to offer all of us who struggle with finding meaning in an increasingly complex and sometimes bewildering world.

Charles Handy is one of the world's best known authors and lecturers on management. He helped start the London Business School in the 60s, and is still a visiting professor. He pens regular columns in leading magazines, appears frequently on radio and is a sellout seminar and conference presenter. He has authored a string of highly successful books, the latest of which is The Hungry Spirit, a reflection on the future of work and the shape of business.

Hyped as a "management guru", Charles Handy can be more aptly regarded as a philosopher for our modern age. Key among Handy's contributions is his ability to absorb and synthesise the seminal works of other management writers and economists — the likes of Drucker, Fukuyama and Galbraith. But he also quotes poetry in his books, and refers to philosophers, from Peter Singer to Nietzsche. His career as a consultant and professor has taken Charles Handy around the globe, ensuring a truly international and wide-ranging perspective.

Charles Handy has sold millions of copies of his books world-wide. It cannot just be managers and business executives who make up this market, and nor should it. The Hungry Spirit — like earlier books The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat — has as much relevance for the unemployed or struggling as it does for the overworked professional.

Capitalism creaking

Capitalism, says Charles Handy, is creaking. While it has proved itself a superior alternative to communism or the more extreme varieties of socialism, it has failed, thus far, to convince that it has the complete answer to our desire for progress. "Capitalism, in fact, has destroyed certainty, which is not what it was meant to do."

Charles Handy identifies five issues to illustrate the limitations of capitalism.

Artificial markets don't work.
"Putting public utilities into the marketplace creates private monopolies until alternative suppliers arise, and an official regulator, no matter how determined or how clever, is not the same as a free choice for the consumer."

Markets can lower standards.
For example when more TV channels fight for the same pool of advertising money; or when universities compete for students by offering faster, more compressed courses or higher grades.

Markets are now global.
"The idea that the invisible hand of the market would work to 'the benefit of all' must therefore also be interpreted on a global basis."

Markets can deepen difference.
"The bigger the market, the bigger the rewards to the really successful players, be they individuals or corporations."

Markets ignore the free.
If you don't price it, it's worthless to the market. But clean air, productive soil and healthy oceans are all valuable. So is unpaid work in the home or community. "By ignoring what is inevitably unpriced the market can distort our values."

And what price does the free market extract from individuals? Studies show that American parents spend 40 per cent less time with their children than they did 30 years ago. Per capita consumption is up 45 per cent in 20 years, but quality of life has dropped 51 per cent. Barely a fifth of young people believe they have a very good chance of achieving "the good life". Salaried workers the world over are working longer and longer hours. The ethos of competition "reaches down into the institution and demands a sort of corporate Darwinism, the survival of the fittest and the death of the rest, in the organisation as well as in society as a whole," Charles Handy says.

Charles Handy takes on another sacred cow when he questions who benefits from greater efficiency and the growth it generates. The Japanese word chindogu will be unfamiliar to most, but the concept is instantly known — all those useless things we might be tempted to buy. A chindogu society, Charles Handy says, may produce excellent economic growth, but it doesn't provide good enough reasons for working or living. "If 'buoyant consumer demand' means a world full of junk, it is hard to see why we should want to work so hard for it," he warns.

Handy's views and particularly, his levels of optimism, have changed over the course of his prolific writing. The Age of Unreason, written in 1989, was followed by a much darker The Empty Raincoat just four years later. Much of the shift flowed from a greater realisation of the impact of technological and social change on individuals, especially those discarded by downsized and re-engineered businesses.

New employment patterns

Now in his late 60s, Charles Handy was of a generation where, after graduating from Oxford, a young man with no work or practical experience, could be recruited by a large organisation which offered lifelong employment. Such a notion was even then, something of a joke. As Charles Handy points out, the lifespan of the average business itself is less than 40 years.

"1/2 x 2 x 3 = P" is a frequent point of reference for Charles Handy. This benign looking equation in fact means:

half as many people, paid twice as much, producing three times as much work, equal productivity and profit.

Those salaried staff who are still employed work to the exclusion of all other facets of their life. Those who are no longer or never were part of the core workforce face a far more uncertain future. In Britain in 1995 for instance, fully half of the available workforce did not have a full-time, permanent job. Rather, they were unemployed, part-time, self-employed or temporary workers.

"The real social revolution of the last thirty years, one we are still living through, is the switch from a life that is largely organised for us, once we have opted into it, to a world in which we are all forced to be in charge of our own destiny", writes Charles Handy in The Hungry Spirit. This environment is creating not jobs but job portfolios — "a collection of clients, a jigsaw of work," he says Charles Handy. While the potential for endlessly renegotiating contracts of all types may be exhilarating for some, for many others it is a scenario of horrible insecurity.

The third age

The changing world of work has enormous implications not just for those people who have core jobs or don't, but for those who have retired from them. With a select group of core workers compressing their working lives into shorter and shorter timeframes and health and medical knowledge increasing in the Western world, we face a longer and healthier retirement. Maybe a third of our lives will be lived post-work as we once knew it. This "third age" as Charles Handy terms it, will offer opportunity and challenge. Government provided pension plans will be not be sufficient for future generations to retire on, an issue all Western democracies are struggling with. Our third age will be, to a great extent, what we make of it.

As work as we traditionally know it is available to fewer people and the map of our working lives changes dramatically, Charles Handy suggests we return to a fundamental question: what sort of living does one want?

"As things stand, we seem to be saying that life is essentially about economics, that money is the measure of most things, and that the market is its sorting mechanism. My hunch is that most of us don't believe any of this, and that it won't work ... but we are trapped in our own rhetoric and have, as yet, nothing else to offer not even a different way to talk about it. There is, I believe, a hunger for something else which might be more enduring and more worthwhile."

In The Hungry Spirit, Charles Handy explores a concept he terms "proper selfishness". It is not self-absorption or a disregard for others. Rather, he makes the point that we "find ourselves through what we do and through the long struggle of living with and for others. 'I do therefore I am' is more real than 'I think therefore I am'".

Proper selfishness springs from an understanding that each of us is intertwined with others' lives. To understand ourselves, says Charles Handy, hopefully leads us to realise that self-respect comes from responsibility for other people and other things.

What role business?

Charles Handy asks the same questions of businesses as he does of individuals. What is their purpose? Why are they here? What will they look like in 10 or 20 years time? He draws on observations of vast multi-nationals with a larger GDP than many developing nations through to family-owned businesses. He recalls with irony the maxim hammered home when he went to business school, the one was written above the blackboard in each classroom: maximise the return to shareholders in the medium term. But to simply make a profit is not enough, says Charles Handy: you don't play cricket in order to chalk up a good batting average. You need a good batting average in order to keep playing in the first team.

Charles Handy contrasts the power and influence of shareholders in Anglo/American businesses with the very different expectations and relationship between shareholders and publicly listed companies in Japan and Germany. Different cultural norms apply. Japanese companies plough much greater percentages of profit back into long-term business development, less pressured by an expectation to return high dividends to shareholders than their American or UK counterparts. Charles Handy argues this is a more sustainable path for development of healthy business.

Comparing the tangible assets to the listed values of large corporations such as Microsoft, Charles Handy argues it is corporations' core people that account for the huge and growing difference. If people are intellectual property, they are a company's greatest asset. Yet in a post-slavery age, those professionals can all get up and leave on Monday. The imperative to retain motivated and highly-skilled core staff demands a need for new business structures, argues Charles Handy.

Federalism is a centuries-old concept with new relevance for corporations, according to Charles Handy. He cites examples of sprawling multi-nationals, co-ordinated by the tiniest of centres. There is no more head office as we know it: the slimmed down centre plays a co-ordinating role, not a controlling one.

At the centre of the concept of federalism is an ungainly term called subsidarity, a term which Charles Handy has returned to frequently over the past decade. It differs from devolution of power, because it starts from a premise that authority exists at the lowest possible point in the organisation. It is reverse delegation: the parts will choose to delegate to the centre. At its heart, it is a moral principle, says Charles Handy. "Stealing people's responsibilities is wrong".

With federalism comes the need for trust. There is nothing soft about Handy's views on this theme. You cannot trust people you don't know, he says. This means people need to work in effective groups of no more than 50, so that each can know who he or she is working with. Trust requires boundaries, constant learning and bonding. It must be earned. And it is tough. Trust, says Charles Handy, is like glass. Once broken, it can never be the same again. "Trust has to be ruthless. Where you cannot trust, you have to check once more, with all the systems of control that involves."

Where trust does exist and where subsidarity is effective, workplaces can be transformed in a physical sense as well. Charles Handy describes a "virtual workplace", such as an advertising agency where physical space is constructed around clients, not staff. Staff have lockers and a shoulder bag rather than their own office. Meeting rooms are assigned to clients, desks and computers are available as required.

A selected bibliography

• The Hungry Spirit (1997)
  
• The Search for Meaning (1996)
  
• Beyond Certainty (1995)
  
• The Empty Raincoat (1993)
  
• Waiting for the Mountain to Move (1991)
  
• The Age of Unreason (1989)
  
• The Future of Work (1984)
  
• Gods of Management (1979)
  
• Understanding Organisations (1976)
  
  

by Rachel Rose