Charles Handy, management thinker and author, 1932-2024
Author, thinker and public speaker Charles Handy, who died on Friday, aged 92, was one of the few non-Americans to merit the description “management guru”.
It was a term he disliked, preferring the tag “social philosopher”. Handy favoured counselling over consulting for leaders and his chosen method was “Socratic dialogue”. It often took place over a meal at one of his homes in Putney or Norfolk, to which he and his wife Elizabeth invited interesting thinkers, writers and business people.
But Handy’s many insights into organisations, offered in public lectures and a series of books and articles, were practical, prescient and often provocative.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he predicted now commonplace innovations in the world of work such as the rise of what would today be called the “gig economy”, the spread of outsourcing, and the growth of the portfolio career. Well into old age, he remained a bold, common sense advocate of human values in companies and a forthright critic of the dangers of breakneck automation. “If the organisation were purely digitised,” he said in a speech in 2017, “it would be a very dreary place, a prison for the human soul.”
Handy was born in County Kildare, in what is now the Republic of Ireland, son of a Protestant archdeacon. He described himself as “one of the last of the Anglo-Irish”, and had the right to both Irish and UK passports. “Our beginnings do shape our ends,” he wrote in the autobiographical Myself And Other More Important Matters in 2006. “I can feel Irish at heart but still belong physically and emotionally to Britain and, indeed, to Europe.”
