Philosopher and management thinker who coined the phrase ‘portfolio’ career, and believed companies should retain their humanity
For a country that prides itself on its professional and financial services sector, the UK has produced remarkably few world-ranking management and organisational thinkers. At the very top of that pile, however, is Charles Handy, the writer and social philosopher – his preferred designation – who has died aged 92.
As both a thinker and educator, Handy was unusual. Although a professor – he was a founding faculty member of the London Business School (LBS), the UK’s first graduate business school, in the 1960s – he never followed the conventional path, ploughing a narrow furrow and publishing in specialist journals.
What he did was think, about the big human issues of business, society and democracy, turning his thoughts, often anchored in his own experience, into books, articles and talks with characteristically evocative titles such as The Age of Unreason (1989), The Empty Raincoat (1994), The Hungry Spirit (1997) and The Second Curve (2015). They gained him an international audience and global sales of more than 2m.
In his ability to perceive and articulate developments in the world of work before they crystalised, and in his big-picture approach, Handy took after another atypical European academic, Peter Drucker, dubbed the “father of management”, whom Handy admired. Handy was writing about the future of work as early as 1984, foresaw an era of discontinuous change in The Age of Unreason – his breakthrough book – as well as predicting the advent of the gig economy, remote working and the fragmentation of the traditional career. The “portfolio life” was his coinage, which he defined by living it.
In management terms, Handy’s legacy is his steadfast defence of the company as an evolving community of people rather than a machine or set of contracts. This was based on an unshakeable belief in humanity – “humanity will triumph – people need people”, he said in a podcast interview in 2021, at the height of a pandemic lockdown.
To thrive, a company had to make space for human purpose, human balance and human fulfilment. “Doing your best at what you are best at,” was his Aristotelian recipe, adding “for the benefit of others” at the end. This fed into his belief that the organisation of the future needed to be flexible, decentralised and built on trust rather than formal hierarchy and a rule book.
Born in Ireland, in Clane, Co Kildare, the son of Joan (nee Scott) and Brian Handy, a Protestant clergyman, Charles went to Bromsgrove school, Worcestershire, then studied classics at Oriel college, Oxford, from which he absorbed influences that marked his thinking throughout his life.
Just as formative was his first job at an outpost of Shell in Borneo in 1956, only doubly so: first because it was while there that he met Elizabeth Hill, then working at the British High Commission in Singapore, at a party in Kuala Lumpur, and second because, with her trenchant help, it showed him what he did not want to be. They married in 1962.
The epiphany came in 1965, when he found himself back in London, in an anonymous shared office at Shell HQ, greeted by a three-page list of responsibilities on his desk with no name on it. That struck him as not very human. Liz more forcefully gave him to understand that seeing the adventurous expat she had met and married turn into a dull office drudge was not part of their life’s plan.
Instead he relocated to the US – another formative experience – to attend the Sloan executive study programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he returned to London in 1967 to set up a UK version of the programme at the LBS.
He endowed it with a humanistic cast far removed from the usual finance and quantitative orientation. “Charles always had a sense of what it is to be human,” his friend and close LBS colleague Lynda Gratton said. “He inspired students, readers and friends to think more deeply, question more profoundly and live a life nearer to being human – with all its complexities and questions.”
Handy left LBS for a four-year stint as warden of St George’s House at Windsor Castle (1977-81), a sort of spiritual thinktank, before, again egged on by Liz, deciding to quit and go freelance as a writer and speaker. They reorganised their life, and, half-joked Handy, rewrote their marriage contract.
Henceforth they would split the year in two, with the work of first one, then the other, taking priority. Liz became his formidable agent as well as resuming her own career as a successful photographer – they subsequently collaborated on several books – and their time would be spent half in their former farm labourer’s cottage in rural Norfolk and half in their London home. They also shared cooking duties for the many visitors who arrived at both places to discuss world events, photography and politics over a generous lunch.
Relishing the new regime, Handy launched into a series of books that conquered an audience stretching far beyond business types. In fact, the latter were sometimes dismayed by what he had to say. He rejected shareholder capitalism, deeming shareholder ownership of companies a fiction and a fraud, and fretted that big corporations had become “prisons of the soul”.
For him, “good organisations are like a small English village. Everyone knows each other and what the other does. There’s no job title, you’re just Charles or Liz, and you help each other out. It’s not owned, people belong to it.” In those circumstances, management becomes a matter of common sense, not the technocratic exercises described in the textbooks he scorned.
If Handy’s writing style was conversational and accessible, his speaking could reach heights worthy of the ancients he had learned from. This was done without bravado, PowerPoint or notes, but with a quiet intensity that made every listener feel as if he was addressing them personally.
It was there that his inner firebrand sometimes surfaced. Few of those present will forget his closing speech, or the spontaneous standing ovation it prompted, at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna in 2018, when he called for a Lutheran Reformation of management, urging the audience not to wait for a great leader but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses … If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
Handy was active almost until the last. His final book, suitably titled The View from Ninety: Reflections on Living a Long, Contented Life, is due for publication in 2025.
Liz died in a car accident in 2018. Handy is survived by his son and daughter, Scott and Kate, four grandchildren and by two sisters, Ruth and Margaret.
