Born: July 25th, 1932
Died: December 13th, 2024
The Irish-born, London-based management guru and social philosopher Charles Handy, who has died aged 92, was one of the most respected management thinkers of his generation. He often predicted organisational trends years before they materialised as corporate realities. For many years, he also presented Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Four.
In the early 1980s, Handy developed the concept of the “shamrock organisation” to describe companies with three integrated leaves: a core of full-time employees working alongside subcontractors on one side, and a band of temporary workers on the other.
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He also coined the term “portfolio life”, the concept of self-employed workers using their multiple skills to make enough money to allow them to have a good work/life balance. And he encouraged people to change careers throughout their life to discover undervalued talents.
The author of more than 20 books – including The Age of Unreason (1989), The Elephant and the Flea: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist (2001) and The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society (2015) – Handy was a lucid critic of corporates who didn’t fully embrace the ethical and human dimensions of their businesses. He was also one of the first management gurus to accept that child-rearing was work.
He had a wonderful commanding voice, and a droll and wry sense of humour. He was a visionary who was way ahead of his time
Furthermore, Handy wasn’t afraid to reformulate his own ideas as organisational culture evolved. For instance, in his book The Empty Raincoat (1995), he acknowledged that he had underestimated “how greedy organisations were going to be in their demands of workers’ time”; and that modern communications had made it very difficult for people to be allowed to make mistakes without being sharply criticised, thus eroding the creativity and experimentation that he believed was essential to purposeful work.
He disapproved of money-obsessed executives who had a narrow focus on shareholder value, and once described the stock exchange as a form of slavery. More recently, he was critical of companies mandating their workers to return to the office when technology allowed them to work productively from home.
Handy left his first permanent job as a marketing executive for the oil company Shell International in southeast Asia at the age of 31, to study for a year at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the US. He returned to England in 1967 to manage the Sloan Programme at the London School of Business, Britain’s first graduate school.
In 1972, he became Professor in Managerial Psychology at the London School of Business. But in 1977 he left this job to focus on freelance writing and speaking engagements, with his wife Elizabeth (née Hill) as his manager. The couple had met in 1960 at a party in Kuala Lumpur, and married in 1962. Their daughter Kate was born in 1966, and their son Scott in 1968.
Attending his father’s funeral in 1977, Handy was so deeply touched by the profound impact his father had on the local community that he briefly considered becoming an Anglican priest
In a 2012 Irish Times interview, Handy said that “without [Elizabeth], I would have been a very good golfer, very large and very drunk – because I would have retired from my job about 25 years ago, having been a rather bad oil executive”.
In 1984, Handy was a core contributor to an RTÉ radio One series on The Future of Work, produced and presented by John Quinn. Over the next two decades, he was a regular guest on Quinn’s radio show The Open Mind. “He had a wonderful commanding voice, and a droll and wry sense of humour. He used storytelling and imagery effectively to portray difficult concepts. He was a visionary who was way ahead of his time,” said Quinn.
Handy also developed a close friendship with Irish businessman Ronan King, who left a busy accountancy practice to work for the Special Olympics in 2003 and later managed the Ballymun Regeneration project “Charles had an aura of humility, an understated sense of humour and human kindness that is often lacking in people who are world famous,” said King. “He shaped the lives of many Irish businesspeople.”
Drawing on Aristotle’s eudaemonia theory, Handy often said: “If every organisation could find out what they were best at, and if they did their best with what they were best at, for the good of others, it would get very exciting.”
“My message was always that what business is about is creating things or services that are useful to people and will actually make the world a better place,” he told Kathy Sheridan.
More recently, in an interview with the Financial Times, he said he was encouraged by young people’s ability to handle risk: “They live far more dangerously than we did . . . They are more relaxed about money and the future.”
But he said he was less optimistic about companies themselves, where “hundreds of thousands of talented people have no room to express themselves . . . They suck the lifeblood out of you, these big organisations, because people aren’t connected to the purpose”.
The eldest of three children of Joan (née Scott) Handy and Brian Handy, he grew up in a rural Church of Ireland rectory in Clane, Co Kildare where his father was rector and archdeacon of Kildare. Following his education as a boarder in Bromsgrove School in Worcestershire, he studied classics, history and philosophy at Oriel College in Oxford, graduating with a first class honours.
Handy remained reasonably active in his eighties, although a stroke in 2019, slowed him down somewhat
Attending his father’s funeral in 1977, Handy was so deeply touched by the profound impact his father had on the local community that he briefly considered becoming an Anglican priest. But two bishops refused to nominate him for theology college and instead offered him a job as head of St George’s House at Windsor Castle, a training college for future bishops. He took the job and moved with his wife and their young children. Four years later, the family relocated to the south London suburb of Putney.
In latter decades, Handy and his wife collaborated on work – having got a degree at the age of 50, Elizabeth became a professional photographer. Their joint projects included a book of essays by women in their 60s entitled Reinvented Lives (2002).
Although dividing their time between their homes in London and Norfolk, the couple maintained strong connections with family and friends in Ireland.
In his autobiography, Myself and Other More Important Matters (2006), Handy wrote: “I can feel Irish at heart but still belong physically and emotionally to Britain and, indeed, to Europe.” His sister Ruth Handy, who had a similar career as an organisational psychologist at the Irish Management Institute in Dublin, said he was very proud of his Irish passport and corrected anyone who described him as a British management guru. Trinity College Dublin was one of many universities that bestowed him with an honorary doctorate. President Michael D Higgins gave him a President’s Award in 2015. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2000 New Year Honours.
Handy was critical of companies mandating their workers to return to the office when technology allowed them to work productively from home
Handy remained reasonably active in his eighties, although a stroke in 2019 slowed him down somewhat. While recovering in hospital, he became impatient with the instructions doled out to him by medical staff, and insisted that a notice be pinned above his bed, reading: “Charles Handy is Allowed to Do Whatever He Wants To Do”. That same year, he wrote a book, 21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges – a compendium of life lessons (with chapter titles such as Curiosity Did Not Kill the Cat and What You Can’t Count Matters More than What You Can) for his grandchildren, interspersed with touching tributes to Elizabeth, who had died in a car crash in March 2018.
Between 2020 and 2023, Handy wrote 60 columns for The Idler magazine. At the time of his death, he had completed his last book, The View from Ninety: Reflections on Living a Long, Contented Life, which will be published in 2025.
Charles Handy is survived by his daughter Kate, an osteopath; his son Scott, an actor and theatre director; his four grandchildren Leo, Sam, Nephele and Scarlett; and his sisters Margaret and Ruth.