Charting handsomely with Charles Handy: Departure of a delightful doyen

Charles Brian Handy

There are a handful of management thinkers who have immensely contributed with their original and radical thinking. Charles Brian Handy, famously known as the best-known British “Social Philosopher,” passed away three months ago. In my view, he is on par with Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg with regard to the authentic inputs to management. Today’s column is a reflection of the resourcefulness of Charles Handy, attempting to draw parallels to Sri Lankan context. 

Overview 

“The companies that survive 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, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul,” so said Charles Handy. He was an expert on organisational behaviour. He walked through a road less travelled. As both a thinker and educator, he was not just a professor but a founding faculty member of the London Business School (LBS), the UK’s first graduate business school. More than specialised journal publications he preferred books that catered for a much wider audience. 

Among the books he wrote, “Understanding Organizations’ (1976), “Gods of Management” (1978), “The Future of Work” (1984), “Understanding Schools” (1986), “Understanding Voluntary Organizations” (1988), “The Age of Unreason” (1989), “Inside Organizations (1990), “The Empty Raincoat (1994)”, “The Age of Paradox” (1994), “Waiting for the Mountain to Move” (1995), “Beyond Certainty” (1995), “The Hungry Spirit (1997)”, “New Alchemists” (1999), “Thoughts for the Day” (1999), “The Elephant and the Flea” (2001), “Re-invented lives” (2002), “Myself and Other More Important Matters (2006)”, “The New Philanthropists “(2006), “21 Ideas for Managers” (2000), and “The Second Curve” (2015) appear prominently. 

Among his widely acknowledged ideas, let me pick my preferred four, namely, “Portfolio Career,” “Shamrock Organization,” “Cultures with Divine Features,” and “Sigmoid Curve.”

1.Portfolio career 

Charles Handy popularised the concept of a portfolio career in his 1994 book The Empty Raincoat. According to him, a portfolio career is a collection of different roles, rather than just one job at a single organisation. It can include multiple paid and/or voluntary roles and also working for several different companies or organisations at the same time. It can also involve having a variety of clients that you offer different services to. The “gig workers” in the modern day and time was one of his visionary forecasts. 

Among the tips for building a portfolio that he suggested include choosing the best examples of your work, designing pages to have impact and to be easy to read, selecting documentation that present concrete evidence of your skills, labelling each item for easy identification and tailoring the items you include to match each job for which you apply. 

A typical portfolio may include certificates, transcripts, samples of past work, letters of recommendation, achievement stories as well as leadership strength. A portfolio can provide insight into your personality and work ethic. It can also show an employer proof of your organisational, communication, and career-related skills. Stemming from Handy’s original work, now the Harvard Business School advocates more focusing on a “career portfolio” than a “career path.” I have met several Uber and PickMe drivers in Sri Lanka who are part-time employees elsewhere.

2.Shamrock Organization 

Charles Handy proposed a novel way of depicting an organisational structure. In his 1989 book, The Age of Unreason, he introduced The Shamrock Organization as a model of organisational structure that has three parts, or leaves. The three leaves of the shamrock are core workers (a small group of permanent employees who keep the company running), contract workers (subcontractors who are hired as needed and paid by results), and flexible workers (casual or part-time employees who are hired as needed). 

The shamrock model can be used to map an organisation’s structure and to plan for change and development. It is often used to explain the trend of outsourcing non-core functions.  I have personally seen this happening in two multinationals that I worked for so many years ago. Handy likened the three types of workers to the three leaves of a shamrock, who had different expectations and were managed and rewarded differently. 

He is of the view that work, for the most part, should be primarily made up of short-term contracts, as many little jobs provide enrichment to a higher degree than doing the same thing for one’s entire life.  What Charles Handy proposed not only maintains a humanistic approach to organisational structure but also emphasises the need for these three different types of workers to fit seamlessly together in order to produce a productive organisation. 

3.Cultures with divine features 

Charles Handy categorised an organisational culture into four distinct types and went on to draw parallels to Greek Gods to illustrate the characteristics of each type. These types included Power Culture, Role Culture, Task Culture, and Person Culture; each representing a different dynamic of power distribution and decision-making within the organisation. 

The four organisational cultures of Charles Handy can be described as follows:

The Power Culture:

Based on Zeus, this culture emphasises centralised or top-down, power and influence. It typically operates in a formal environment led by a fast-paced leader, like a dynamic entrepreneur, focused on producing quick results. While this culture can be efficient, it can also be challenging for employees to thrive due to its high expectations and emphasis on interpersonal relationships and trust over objective ideas. Success often hinges on the quality of leadership.

The Role Culture: 

Based on Apollo, this culture is bureaucratic, run by strict procedures, narrowly defined roles, and precisely delineated powers. Although this culture uses predictability and stability to help employees understand their role in the organisation, it can also prevent businesses from adapting.

The Task Culture: 

Based on Athena, this culture is small-team-focused, results- and solutions-oriented and characterised by flexibility, adaptability, and a culture of empowered employees. A team immersed in a task culture leverages its expertise to focus on end results. Through problem-solving and high levels of creativity, the task culture fosters deeper employee engagement across the group. However, staff must be motivated and open to workplace collaboration for it to succeed. 

The Person Culture: 

Based on Dionysius, this culture focuses on the individual and prioritised organisations working toward the betterment of their people. Such organisations are value-oriented, people-focused and geared toward meeting individual employees’ self-actualisation needs by utilising each staffer’s unique talents. However, because the culture relies heavily on self-motivation, it can be challenging for businesses to implement effectively.

I have observed all four above cultures in Sri Lankan organisations, with promises and pitfalls. 

4.Sigmoid Curve

The Sigmoid Curve is named after “sigmoid”, the Greek word for the letter “s.” It represents the curve of a new life cycle emerging from an existing one, much like an “S” on its side. It was much referred to by Charles Handy, in his book, “Age of Paradox.” He argues that to survive and grow, all individuals and institutions must plot the point on their present life cycle and then plan and implement transformational change. He surveyed the state of the world, and his observations are indeed interesting. People have been adversely affected by change; capitalism “has not proved as flexible as it was supposed to be”; and increased technology and productivity have resulted in fewer jobs for some, increased consumption for others. His solution lies in “the management of paradox,” in essence planning for the unplanned. Handy identifies nine global paradoxes. Among them, the U.S. and Britain have the highest percentages of employed people, but their workers are the least protected; in Bangladesh 90% of houses are owner-occupied, in richer Switzerland 33%--and notes that to cope with the turbulence of life, organisation must start in the mind. 

Picture 1 depicts a few scenarios associated with the S curve.

In Western culture, life is seen as a long line starting on the left and going to the right, leading from “alpha to Omega” (first and last letters of Greek alphabet). Westerners typically see things in terms of separate chunks of beginnings and ends ages, jobs, relationships, projects, tasks, even life itself. As we are much aware, in eastern cultures, life is viewed as a series of cycles or waves. Everything is linked and connected. Everything has its own natural life span, so that in birth there is death and in death there is new birth. This has much relevance to what Charles Handy says about “S Curve.” 

As picture one illustrates, one has to be proactive in taking appropriate actions at the ideal transformation point. Else, it will be difficult, and the actions are more of a reactive nature. The secret of constant growth is to start a new Sigmoid Curve before the first one peters out. The right place to start that second curve is at point A, where there is the time, as well as the resources and the energy, to get the new curve through its initial explorations and floundering before the first curve begins to dip downwards.

We have many Sri Lankan examples to show that the real energy for change only comes when you are looking for disaster in the face, at point B on the first curve. At this point, however, it is going to require a mighty effort to drag oneself up to where, by now, one should be on the second curve. To make it worse, the current leaders are now discredited because they are seen to have led the organisation down the hill, resources are depleted, and energies are low. 

Way forward 

Charles Handy was actively involved in authoring his final book, suitably titled, “The View from Ninety: Reflections on Living a Long, Contented Life, is due for publication in 2025. His illustrious 92 years of life on earth can be summed up the way he spoke at a Peter Drucker Memorial Event in 2018. “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?” Pertinent and profound indeed.  

(The writer, a Senior Professor in Management, and an Independent Non-executive Director, can be reached at [email protected], [email protected] or www.ajanthadharmasiri.info.)