Charles Handy, a writer, social philosopher and management theorist who presciently imagined a brave new corporate world where employees worked remotely, jobs were outsourced and workers had “portfolio careers,” working for themselves and contracting their skills to companies, died on Friday at his home in London. He was 92.
His son, Scott, confirmed the death.
Mr. Handy, the son of an Irish Protestant vicar, brought a humanistic social philosophy to the business world with the unconventional suggestion that corporations were too focused on profit at the expense of the individual and the human aspect of work.
He said businesses should behave like communities or villages, treating employees like citizens who have rights and privileges and a share in the profits. It was just common sense, he reasoned, that people were more likely to be committed to their work and a company’s mission if they had a hand in shaping it.
Ranked among a pantheon of management thinkers that includes Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Michael Porter and Warren Bennis, Mr. Handy predicted organizational trends years before they materialized as corporate realities.
His seminal 1989 book, “The Age of Unreason,” which put him on the map as a management expert and provocative prophet, described the late 20th century as being in the midst of what he called “discontinuous” change — profound social and economic shifts that were transforming business, education and the very nature of work and rendering the past as a useless guide for navigating what comes next.
He predicted decentralized, community-oriented “federal organizations,” in which a small corporate headquarters served the needs of diverse and far-flung business units. The corporate center would retain key financial control, but the creative and production energy would lie with workers who were closest to the customers.
“The companies that survive the longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world — not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others” and “their ability to make people happy,” he wrote. “Some call those things a soul.”
Mr. Peters, a co-author of the 1982 business best seller “In Search of Excellence: Lessons From America’s Best-Run Companies,” said in an interview for this obituary in 2022 that Mr. Handy “was part of a small club that pushed relentlessly, albeit gracefully, to really get beyond the confines of the sterility of M.B.A. programs and deal with the fact that organizations are made up of people.”
“And developing people,” he added, “is what you do if you are a leader of any kind, from a Cub Scout troop to a giant company.”
Fond of visual metaphors, Mr. Handy, in the early 1980s, coined the phrase “shamrock organization” to describe what he saw emerging — companies with three integrated leaves: a core of full-time employees flanked by a group of outside contractors on one side and a phalanx of temporary workers on the other.
His forecast of a “portfolio life” — in which workers would pursue “a multifaceted, multiclient freelance career” while taking responsibility “for their own earning potential, personal development, and general well-being” — proved prescient as the gig economy grew in the 21st century.
He also foresaw, in the 1980s, a time when computer technology might spell the end of what he called the “gathered” organization — with employees working together under one roof — and replace it with a “dispersed” work force, people doing jobs remotely far from the home office.
Mr. Handy, a graduate of the University of Oxford, worked for Shell International, the Dutch oil and gas giant, and spent a decade there on a management fast track only to realize that corporate climbing was anathema to him. He walked away from a corporate career and attended M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, where he earned his M.B.A. and encountered future thought leaders like Chris Argyris, Edgar Schein and Mr. Bennis.
Returning to England, Mr. Handy taught at the London Business School, Britain’s first graduate business school. There, as part of a course he taught on management psychology, aimed at career executives in their 30s, he sent his students to the theater in their first week. He “was as likely to assign Dostoyevsky as Drucker,” Strategy & Business magazine wrote in a profile of him in 2003.
At the London school, Mr. Handy emerged as a prominent management thinker and philosopher in what had long been a distinctly American field.
“If Peter Drucker is responsible for legitimizing the field of management and Tom Peters for popularizing it, then Charles Handy should be known as the person who gave it a philosophical elegance and eloquence that was missing from the field,” Mr. Bennis, who died in 2014, told Strategy & Business.
Mr. Handy was never prescriptive. In a field dominated by how-to books on management, he declined to provide answers with snappy, quotable aphorisms. Instead, he focused on how human needs and dynamics might fit into a corporate structure.
His many books, which sold more than two million copies around the world, include “Understanding Organizations” (1976), “Gods of Management” (1978) and “The Age of Paradox” (1994).
Mr. Handy’s work spurred many companies, large and small, to reconsider the way people were treated and to recognize that lifestyle issues among employees mattered to the health and success of an organization.
“Organizations are not machines,” he wrote in a memoir, “Myself and Other More Important Matters” (2006), adding, “They are living communities of individuals. The essential task of leadership is to combine the aspirations and needs of the individuals with the purposes of the larger community to which they all belong.”
Charles Brian Handy was born on July 25, 1932, in County Kildare, Ireland. He and two sisters were raised in St. Michael’s Vicarage, 30 miles west of Dublin, where his father, Brian Handy, was the rector of two small parishes. His mother, Joan (Scott) Handy, oversaw the home.
At 18, Mr. Handy left Ireland to study history and philosophy at Oxford and never returned to his native country. After graduation, in 1956, he spent 10 years with Shell, mostly managing marketing functions in Southeast Asia.
In 1960, at a party in Kuala Lumpur, he met his future wife, Elizabeth Ann Hill, who worked in Singapore for the British High Commission. She became a successful professional photographer as well as Mr. Handy’s agent and business manager. The couple collaborated on several books.
They had homes in London and Norfolk, England. In 2018, Elizabeth Handy was killed in a car accident in Norfolk. Mr. Handy was driving their car. In addition to his son, Scott, he is survived by a daughter, Kate Handy Jones; his sisters, Margaret Handy and Ruth Handy; and four grandchildren.
When Shell assigned him to Liberia in 1965, Mr. Handy, at his wife’s adamant urging, decided to leave the company. “You must be out of your mind, handing your life over to these people,” he recalled her telling him. “They own you.”
He accepted her challenge and departed for M.I.T.
When his father, the vicar, died in 1977, Mr. Handy was overwhelmed by the huge number of people who came to the funeral. So impressed by his father’s influence on so many, Mr. Handy considered becoming a clergyman. Instead, he took a job as warden at St. George’s House, a private study center for Protestant bishops, in Windsor Castle. Mr. Handy focused on social ethics and values, and these concepts became central to his thinking about business organizations.
He left St. George’s after four years and focused on becoming a writer. In 1981, he was approached by a radio producer to become a regular contributor to the BBC’s “Thought for the Day,” a two-minute religious commentary during the morning broadcast. The lone lay contributor among bishops, priests and rabbis, Mr. Handy reached a daily audience of many millions for the next 20 years.
In 2019, Mr. Handy, at 87, wrote “21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges,” in which he warned about “handbooks of so-called management.”
“I know now there isn’t one,” he wrote in the book. “Any that you may come across, including one that I wrote myself, will turn out to be practical common sense dressed up with long words to make it seem professional.
“I would only urge you,” he continued, “to remember the three different activities of organizing, leading and managing, and to apply them appropriately, because I truly believe that managing people, instead of leading them, is wrong and has resulted in too many dysfunctional and unhappy workplaces. People are more than a human resource.”
The post Charles Handy Dies at 92; Philosopher Envisioned Today’s Corporate World appeared first on New York Times.
