Charles Handy (born 1932) is a writer and broadcaster. Irish-born, he worked for Shell before joining academia. He spent time at MIT and later joined London Business School.
His first book belies the wide ranging, social and philosophical nature of his later work. Understanding Organizations (1976) is a comprehensive and readable primer of organizational theory. It is the most conventional of his books. Its sequel was the idiosyncratic Gods of Management (1978).
Over the last decade Handy has sealed his reputation as a thinker. His books routinely crop up in bestseller lists and he has spread his wings to become a much-quoted sage on the future of society and work. His articles are as likely to appear in the Harvard Business Review as in the lifestyle sections of tabloid newspapers. The cornerstones of his ideas on emerging working structures can be found in The Age of Unreason and his 1994 bestseller The Empty Raincoat (called The Age of Paradox in the United States).
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harles Handy’s The Age of Unreason is a disquieting book – and remains so years after its publication. 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 imagings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.’
The future, writes Handy, 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.
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. ‘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,’ writes 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.
He sees the need for the development of ‘a new intelligentsia’. Education will have to alter radically as the way people think can only be changed by revolutionizing the way they learn and think about learning,
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, what he calls ‘the shamrock organization’ – ‘a form of
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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 coordinates, 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’. (Handy develops his federal thinking in The Empty Raincoat.)
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.’
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 will 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
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they want to do, Time will not simply be divided between work and play – there could be ‘portfolios’ which split 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.
‘An age of unreason is an age of opportunity even if it looks at first sight like the end of all ages,’ says Handy. People must seize the opportunity, not ignore the invaders on the horizon.