Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

A Tribute to Charles Handy (1932-2024)

Karen Linkletter Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

January 6, 2025

On December 13, 2024, we lost a seminal management philosopher and theorist: Charles Handy. Like Peter Drucker, Handy was a social thinker and management theorist who emphasized the human side of work as more important than profits and valued individual growth and development in organizations.


Handy was born in Ireland and studied at Oxford. In 1956, he went to work for Shell, working in Borneo, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Hill. Disillusioned by corporate life, Handy left Shell in 1962 to study management at MIT in their executive program. Inspired by their humanistic approach, he returned to London in 1967 to start the London Business School.

Handy knew Drucker and was a regular keynote speaker at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna. The two men had much in common in terms of their approaches to management and social theory. Like Drucker, Handy became an author (although, unlike Drucker, Handy was a corporate executive before he turned to writing). Handy wrote not just on business but also society, serving as much as a social ecologist as Drucker was. In his pivotal book, The Age of Unreason (1989), Handy argued for the disruption of discontinuity – resulting in a new world of business, education, and work that was highly unpredictable. He rejected shareholder capitalism and saw the organization as a place for human purpose and fulfillment, based on trust. Like Drucker, Handy advocated federalism in organizations, disseminating authority and responsibility to the lowest possible levels. He also saw “the future that had already happened.” Handy coined the term “portfolio life,” where knowledge workers would increasingly work remotely and for multiple organizations. In the 1980s, he posited that society consisted of “shamrock organizations”: those that had three integrated leaves: full-time employees, outside contractors, and temporary workers. Handy thus foresaw the new “gig economy” and increasingly autonomy of knowledge work. Finally, like Drucker, Handy had a life partner who not only supported his career but was an independent woman with her own interests. Liz Handy, like Doris Drucker, was an entrepreneur who ran an interior design business, and later was a professional photographer and Charles’s business agent.


Minglo Shao, founder of CIAM, remembers Handy as a warm man who made several important contributions to what we see as the fundamentals of Management as a Liberal Art. We are thankful for Handy’s contributions to management theory and social thought, and for his legacy at the Global Drucker Forum in the form of the Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series. 

Treasures from the Charles Handy Drucker Forum legacy

By Richard and Ilse Straub with the Drucker Forum Team • December 29, 2024
For 15 years, Charles Handy did us the enormous honor of choosing the Drucker Forum as a privileged platform for delivering his message to the world, and particularly to the younger generation in which he had such faith. Following up on our initial announcement of Charles’ passing Charles Handy (1932–2024) , we are honored to share a selection of his key contributions to the Forum with our wider community. Charles’ brilliant keynotes at the Drucker Forum have become legendary. Normally accessible only to members of the Drucker Society, from today they are available as recordings to the wider public for a period of 30 days. At the first centennial Forum in 2009, Charles talked about his debt to Peter Drucker while outlining his own fundamental management concepts that he had developed over the years. Two years later, he touched on the ideas of Adam Smith and demonstrated how much more to them there was than the celebrated “invisible hand” of self-interest. In his landmark closing address in 2017, pursuing a thread developed in his 2015 book The Second Curve, he called for a management reformation that would turn it into a tool for the common good – thus drawing the first contours of what we would announce six years later as the Next Management . We took to heart his exhortation not to wait for great leaders 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”. Management’s "second curve" will be the focus of the “Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series” in 2025. Following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in 2018 and a severe stroke, Charles was much reduced in mobility in his last years – but not in his determination to continue spreading his message of hope to the world. He couldn’t participate in person in the Drucker Forum 2022, but he participated in a moving online interview with his son Scott, who directed young actors in a short performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Beckett to illustrate some points.  Charles also contributed valued digital articles for our blog and for Drucker Forum partners. Even during the most difficult period of his life he continued to write and develop his ideas in weekly columns for the Idler magazine. This entailed first memorizing the article, then dictating it and finally reviewing it by having someone it re-read to him – a remarkable feat of memory and determination. The article is a jewel and most appropriate for Christmas and the season of self-reflection. Have a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • November 19, 2024
Interview with Karen Linkletter at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2024  Video Interview

The Specifics of Management of the Knowledge Worker

By Ryan Lee • November 7, 2024
Nowhere is management theory demanded more than in managing the knowledge worker, and yet nowhere is management theory more inadequate in addressing a field’s issues than in knowledge work. This is the point Peter Drucker posited in his work Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1991), and to resolve it he came up with six factors that determine the productivity of the management worker. Among these, his final point that management workers “must be treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’” by any given organization is an important concept1. While it only gradually emerged within management theory over the century, it is crucial for any employer and any government to understand and apply if they are to retain a competitive advantage going into the future. Historically, management theory has been about improving the output of the worker through banal efficiency: how to increase the production of steel per head, how to increase the production of cars per hour, how to minimize deficient products, etc. In all these considerations, the worker is a disposable resource. When he is hired, he is set to a particular task that is typically repetitive and thus easily taught, and when he is not needed because of shortcomings in his work, company difficulties, or automation, he is laid off. Referred to as “dumb oxen”, workers were seen in management theory as machines to have productivity squeezed out of. The shift from a majority manufacturing to service-based economy during the first half of the twentieth century changed this dynamic to some extent. The American postwar economic boom introduced the office worker as a common source of employment. This trend continued throughout the conglomerate era of the 1960s and was helped by the decline of the American manufacturing industry in the 1970s. Now in a stage dominated by service and knowledge work, the American economy must approach management differently. The aforementioned cost-asset shift is a demonstration of why this is so, as Drucker’s emphasis on the knowledge worker’s autonomy means that they wield control, not only within their job but over who they should work for as well. This in addition to the high-capital nature of knowledge workers means that the old management theory approach to labor as disposable will backfire catastrophically for any company that tries it with their knowledge workers. It is also important to remember the demographic trends of the United States, and more so the world, in considering why the cost-asset shift is vital. For all of human history until some fifty years ago, population was considered to be in tandem with economic power, given larger populations yielded larger labor forces and consumer markets. Economic growth was thus also correlated with population growth, demonstrated by the historic development of Europe and the United States and the more recent examples of the developing world. Consequently, the worldwide decline in fertility rates, and the decline in population numbers in some developed countries, signals economic decline for the future. In the labor market, smaller populations mean fewer jobs that produce for and service fewer people. Although the knowledge worker has grown in proportion to the total labor market, these demographic declines will affect knowledge workers as well, meaning employers will have a vested interest in retaining their high-capital labor. To enforce this, the cost-asset shift will have to come into play. The wants and needs of the knowledge worker pose a unique challenge in the field of management. Autonomy, for the first time, can be regarded as a significant factor affecting all other aspects of this labor base. What good does a large salary provide a knowledge worker if they don’t feel that they are welcome at an institution? How would they perceive that their work is not being directed towards productive pursuits at their corporation, especially given the brain work and dedication given to it? Of course, the fruits of one’s labor has been a contentious issue in management ever since compensation and workers’ rights became a universal constant with the Industrial Revolution, but this is augmented by the knowledge worker’s particular method of generating value. Given that Drucker poses their largest asset and source of value as their own mind, they will intrinsically have a special attachment to their work almost as their brainchild. Incentivizing the knowledge worker is also only one part of this picture. Per Drucker, the knowledge worker’s labor does not follow the linear relationship between quantity invested and returned. The elaborate nature of knowledge work makes it heavily dependent upon synergy: the right combination of talent can grow an organization by leaps and bounds, while virtually incompatible teams or partnerships can render all potential talent useless. And the human capital cost of the knowledge worker, both in their parents and the state educating them and in cost to their employers, is astronomical compared to all previous kinds of labor. In conclusion, the needs and wants of the knowledge worker must be met adequately, especially in the field of management. Management must almost undergo a revolution to adapt to this novel challenge, for the knowledge worker is the future of economic productivity in the developed world. Those employers that successfully accommodate the demands of this class of talent will eventually reign over those that do not accept that this is the direction economic productivity is headed.  References Drucker, P. F. (1991) Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business.
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