A conversation with a personal hero: Charles Handy
The adage “Never meet you heroes”, comes to mind on a chilly Autumn morning walking to Charles Handy’s home. I had emailed Charles with some questions about an interview he had done for an American podcast. He responded with an invitation to breakfast at his home in Putney.
Handy’s books over the years have shaped my thinking or captured what I already believed about work. Long before anyone had heard of the gig economy, The Empty Raincoat in 1994, popularised the “portfolio career”where you had a variety of roles rather than one job at a single organisation. The Age of Unreason (1995), captured changing relations between workers and employers. The Hungry Spirit (1998), spelled out the spiritual cost of capitalism. Handy didn’t just write this stuff, he lived it as an independent writer, broadcaster, and teacher.
Described as “one of the pleasantest of the London suburbs”[1], most of Victorian and Edwardian Putney survives and Charles lives in just such as house in a second-floor flat above his daughter. The apartment has the air of a 1930s vicarage: clean, simple, while at the same time comfortable. The high-ceilinged room we are in consists of a kitchen with kitchen table in the centre at one end, and at the other a sitting area with comfortable armchairs by a bay window. We start with a simple breakfast of coffee, fruit, yoghurt, and toast, chatting amiably about my past and my interests. Satisfied he has my measure, he invited me to move to the armchairs, sitting side by side with a small table between us upon which I place my recorder.
Roderick: I came across this podcast, and they described you as “Britain’s greatest living management thinker” in the introduction…
Charles: …[Laughs]…
Roderick: …do you think you’ve been influential?
Charles: I think I’ve helped some people to rethink their lives and, in that sense, yes. Quite a lot of people come up to me and saying, “Thanks to your books I’ve done this, done the other thing.”
I was doing a conference once, about 20 years ago, and the host, the chap in charge of it was John Humphreys, who hosts the Today program on the radio. I used to do Thought For The Day…for many, many years. So, I knew John quite well and we were friends and so I thought, “Well, that’s fine. He’s going to quiz me afterwards. That’d be nice.”
Of course, he immediately became John Humphreys, the radio interviewer. He started off by saying, “Well, Charles you write lots of books about business and so on. Do you know any business that has ever changed its ways because of you?” I had to say, “That’s a very good question, John. No, I don’t. I know some people who’ve changed their ways and some of those people are important people in business, so maybe it percolated through to the business, but I wouldn’t pretend that I have somehow totally changed any business.”
I think there are some important people in business who have been influenced by me or perhaps, I don’t know. In a sense when my talks and my books work, it is because people say to themselves, “Yeah, I always thought like that, too, but I didn’t know I did.” I’m only reinforcing some basic attitudes and traits I think that are present in most decent people, only they’ve never sort of realised it.
Roderick: In this podcast I listened to, one of the things that you spoke about was the Greek notion of eudaimonia. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that?
Charles: Well, I studied Aristotle in my youth, and I hated him because I had to study him in his original Greek and he didn’t really give lectures. He just had thoughts on lecture notes, so it was very difficult to understand in Greek, at least I thought so. I really only came to understand it much later in life and under his particular book, The Nicomachean Ethics.
He says the point of good life is eudaimonia, which basically translates as happiness, but a certain sort of happiness which just comes from self-fulfillment. I now translate that for people to the way I like to think Aristotle would have agreed, which is doing the best at what you’re best at. Then I add: for the good of others, because Aristotle believes that our actions should take into account the lives of people around us and there ought to [be] a ripple effect going out there.
I say to people, that’s your point of life: To do the best at what you’re best at for the good of others. Aristotle would have said doing for the good of others means being virtuous. He has a list of virtues which are very interesting. There are 12 of them. I liked particularly the first which translates as courage by which he means the courage to stand up for what you believe in. That comes back to what are your values and so on. He also has things like wit. It’s virtuous to be clever and witty, but like all of these things, if you go overboard, it’s wrong. If you have too much courage, you become arrogant…
Roderick: Or reckless….
Charles: …or reckless. Then if you are too witty, it becomes like Boris Johnson. You’re just witty for the sake of being witty without having a point. Anyway, so I simplify it by saying the best of what you’re best at for the good of others. The thing about philosophers is they come out with these profound statements, but actually the statements are all these questions. I can see the question, doing the best of what you’re best at for the good of others, well what are you best at? That’s what you really got to work out at. Now, my theory for instance goes into education.
One of the jobs of education I think is to help people work out what they’re best at.
I have this other theory…there is in all of us a golden seed, which is our particular talent or gift or whatever that most people never discover but if you do discover it and you water it and fertilise it and help it to grow, you become fantastic. One of the jobs of anybody in your early life is to discover what that might be. Your parent, your teacher, your pastor, your boss, and so on. That’s my mission in life in many ways when people come to see me is to slowly unearth what their particular golden seed is and to say, “Why don’t you do more in that area to pull that out and shine?”
I’d tell a story of my mother. I’m repeating this. You may have read it. I grew up in a rectory in the middle of Ireland…I joined Shell and my parents were quietly horrified. They wanted me to be a bishop, I think…I would eventually to go to my first job in Southeast Asia and as I left home and got into the taxi or whatever it was, my mother said, “Never mind, dear,” She said, “it’ll be great material for your books.” I said, “Books, mother? I’m going to be an oil executive.” She said, “Yes,dear.” Twenty years later, I gave her my first book …she perceived something, I don’t know where, in me that that was I wanted to be, a teacher and a writer. I got there before she died.
Even then, mothers are very strange people, I think. I gave her this book that I had written, which was a textbook, it’s called Understanding Organizations, which is actually a terribly boring book because it’s a textbook and it was my first book and I was trying to impress my colleagues. I sent it to my mother, and I heard nothing. When I saw her again, I said, “Did you like my book?” She said, “Yes, dear, it looks very good.” She said, “I didn’t get very far. I don’t understand why you need all these strange words.”
She said, “Surely there are enough words in the works of William Shakespeare and the authorized version of the Bible to say everything you need to say?”
I said, “Yes. You’re absolutely right.”
Roderick: This idea of finding the seed though, the American idea is to find your bliss, find your passion, most people don’t know what it is.
Charles: No, and passion is the wrong word, by the way.
Roderick: Yes. These are words that I think people use and they don’t
understand what they mean in a philosophical sense…
Charles: …that’s right…
Roderick: …For example, what is happiness? What would you say happiness was?
Charles: Well, it’s back to the Aristotle definition. What is most satisfying in my life is being able to enrich other people’s lives. How can I do that? Well, by using what few talents I have at my disposal, which is talking and writing really, I suppose. I suppose a bit of curiosity about people. I like to find out a little more about you before I can begin to relate to you.
We did a study, my wife and I, on what we call the new philanthropists. These are successful businessmen who sell their business and go into working in charity and creating foundations and charities and so on.
They all said, without any doubt that life is much more interesting and fun, you know, spending their money on good works than making the money. Anybody can make money. There is some kind of satisfaction in that. It is the game, but actually what is really fulfilling is giving it and affecting other people’s lives…
Roderick: And seeing that….
Charles: …and seeing that happen.
Roderick: Happiness doesn’t always mean fun.
Charles: …Oh, that’s right, no….
Roderick: It does mean sometimes you’ve got to do more.
Charles: No. Absolutely, there’s a difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is okay, but it’s not the point of life.
Roderick: One of the discussions I had in one of my classes…ended up a discussion about love and I was trying to explain to them that the word that they get out of, say, the Christian Bible, love is agape, in Greek, or, in Latin, caritas. It’s not this Hollywood or greeting card notion. What’s your definition of love?
Charles: Well, most people when you talk about love, they mean being loved. I love being loved, but actually the real love is loving. There’s a wonderful Chinese expression, may have been Confucius, I’m not sure, but he said that happiness actually is having something to work on, something to hope for and someone to love — not be loved by. Love is going out from you. That’s what it is. Hopefully maybe some of it comes back, but the real important kind of love is the kind of love you have for your kids.
Roderick: It’s almost inverted nowadays with things like social media it’s, “How many likes can I get?”
Charles: Well, absolutely. It’s people giving you love, but the real love is giving love, the unconditional love you have for kids, the unconditional love you should have for your lovely wife. But quite often it’s meant to be reciprocal, you know. People say, “Well, I give this to you. What are you getting back then?” It shouldn’t be that. It should be unconditional. You give your love. As I say, the only pure form of it is a mother for a child, I think, a mother for a baby.
She knows all she gets back is dirty nappies and howls and screams, but she goes on loving it. I have parents whose kids are really mucking themselves up with drugs, and so on, they still love them. They still love them, and nothing comes back. Nothing but anger comes back, but they have this unconditional love, that’s real love. That’s what I mean by love.
Roderick: You have talked about schools, and the way schools are operated nowadays where it’s a process that they go through. I’ve noticed that they’re certificate factories now, they’re not places of learning. One of the things that you didn’t touch on that I’d like to hear from you about is that we don’t teach the value of failure in school.
Charles: No.
Roderick: What is the value of learning from failure?
Charles: It’s immense. I wrote a book, a sort of my memoir. Whilst I was writing it, I discovered it was much more fun to write about my mistakes than writing about my successes, which was pretty boring to me and to anybody else. But the most interesting things in my life are the things that I got wrong and realised that I got them wrong and moved on.
My first posting in Shell, or second posting, actually, was very illuminating in that respect because they put me in charge of the Shell Oil marketing company in Sarawak in Borneo. This was way back in the ’50s. There was no communication possible. No telephone or telex between my office and Singapore, the head office, and people didn’t on the whole want to come to see me because it was pretty bloody uncomfortable.
I was on my own, which was a bit frightening. But what happened was that I could make a hell of a lot of mistakes and correct them before anybody knew. We built a new petrol station while I was there and I had all the plans sent out from London for petrol stations. We had the local engineers follow them absolutely perfectly, and we had a great opening.
But in Sarawak the petrol station sat by the river, because basically they are refueling outboard motors notcars. I remember going to the office about a week later and the big tank, 5,000 gallon tank underground had popped up [with] concrete sitting up at the top because the water level was very high. The drawings were from London. So horror, horror, you know. Okay, we pushed it down, put more cement on top and nobody ever knew. Nobody ever knew because nobody came. But my staff were very, very proud of not telling anybody. To be able to make mistakes and correct them before anybody knows, so you don’t get shamed for them is very good. But if you do make mistakes, do you know the story about Tom Watson and IBM? I think it’s a lovely story. Do you mind me?
Roderick: No, I’d love you to.
Charles: Well, in the early days of IBM, Tom Watson was the sort of famous boss who started the open-door policy and all that. One of his executives, young man, made a horrible mistake and lost about, I don’t know, $10 million, which in those days, was a lot of money. He was mortified. He wrote his letter of resignation and went up to Tom Watson and through the open-door and he said, “Mr. Watson, I’m so, so, so sorry, what I’ve done. Here is my letter of resignation.” Tom looked at him and he said, “Young man, what the hell do you mean? You can’t leave me. I’ve just spent $10 million training you. Of course, I’m going to keep you.” I think that’s absolutely the right thing provided you recognise what happened or what went wrong and how you could be better next time, then mistakes are absolutely terribly important.
Yes, you’re right. Schools don’t welcome mistakes because of what they see as their mission, which is to put stuff into you, and by mistakes, they mean, you have incorrectly remembered the stuff that they put into you. Well, that is all silly anyway because the things that really matter in life you can’t be taught, you can only learn them with some guidance. How do you know how to trust somebody? How do you know to take risky decisions? How do you know to go beyond what you know, and what you will have to do in life? You can’t find that. You can’t be taught those things. You can only learn them.
My complaint about schools is that they’re not in any way real preparation for life because they don’t encourage you with these things. They can’t teach you what you can learn.
Now that’s why the new model of schools, where all the input of stuff comes through the internet with your iPads mobile phones, or whatever, what the schools really become eventually what they have to become, because nothing else they can do, is to give you projects and assignments and so on, which was more an image of real life, which you work on with other people.
My son’s the head of Drama at Eton College, and he manages 25 productions a year in three theaters. So almost everybody in that big school, if they want to, can have an experience of drama, which is fantastic because you have to learn stuff, yes, and you have to deliver it, but you deliver it as a member of the group. There’s no sort of management there, the group is self-managing. There’s a coach called a director. You can’t be an individual, you have to be a part of the group. If you try to hog, it doesn’t work and so on and so forth. All of that, a lot of the lessons of life are there, to present yourself and that’s great. The school is bloody lucky to have that facility and most schools don’t actually, and that’s a shame.
Roderick: We’ve also seen the decline in organisations that would quite often take up that role, like the Boy Scouts or Boys Brigade, stuff like that…
Charles: …absolutely…
Roderick: The history of the Boy Scouts, for example, was Baden-Powell saw a group of young men hanging around in the streets smoking and thought that cannot lead to good things, and he ended up starting the Scout Union. I find that even in my work with a young kid’s soccer club, it’s so hard to get people to want to be part of engaging with it.
Charles: Well, it’s just that there’s the seduction of the video stuff. You know, people live a very private life, sit in their bedrooms and they don’t talk to people, they write to people. Some people don’t know how to talk to adults.
Roderick: That notion of conversation, that notion seems to have affected a lot of areas. Working as a journalist, my job was always to get out and talk to people. Now they just sit there and receive all this information…
Charles: …that’s right, that’s right…
Roderick: …and re-process it, if you like. They’re not reporting, they’re not out in the world, as far as I can see.
Charles: …no, they’re not…
Roderick: There are rare exceptions but I’m not seeing it.
Charles: Well, I think there’ll be a backlash. It’s beginning to come. Mothers are banning all kinds of this technology in the house. Certainly, my daughter has technology-free days and all this sort of stuff. Her kids are sort of okay, I think, but, yes, it’s very tempting and it keeps them quiet. When I’m in charge of the kids, it’s very tempting to let them just watch this stuff instead of activating some real games with them.
Roderick: One of your quotes [from the podcast you were on] was: “What I believe is that we have misunderstood great religions.” I’m wondering if you could talk about that and the role of religion?
Charles: [chuckles] I’m not sure what I meant, really, but I think that a lot of religions these days are against things rather than for things. There’s a lot of religions concentrate on what you believe rather than in what you do. You go into to church and it’s all about believing this and believing that, which is unnecessary, it seems to me.
Roderick: You went on to say, the books of the great religions contain “an awful lot of wisdom and saints”.
Charles: Yes, which you’d need to translate. One of the books I’m going to write is called The Bible According to me, where I see the Bible as rich in stories, which had nothing much to do with God, but to do with how to live your life and I want to translate them.
Every other Sunday, or at least once a month I go to Evensong, not that I’m a practicing Christian, I’m a cultural Christian, I love the music and things. They have a wonderful choir there and the choir sings a Psalm for you, so you don’t have to try and sing it, which is very good. What you do instead is you actually read the words properly rather than try to fit them into the chant. The Psalms are incredibly full of wisdom. They’re written usually by people who are in exile, and they’re in a mess and it’s fantastic…
Roderick: Or they’re heartbroken or lost or they’re reaching out to something they can’t comprehend but people don’t get that.
Charles: But nobody reads the Psalms, but they are very good. Ecclesiastes, too.
Roderick: The difficulty with that is that there are strains of wisdom in all these different books, the Qur’an, the Hindu scriptures, the Bible, but it’s dogma that causes wars between religions.
Charles: Well I think religions have turned into tribes and tribes get competitive…you start fighting other tribes and you forget what you’re fighting about. The tribes I know most about are the tribes in Northern Ireland, the Catholics versus the Protestants. I mean it’s the same God they are worshiping, they just decided to worship along different formulae really and then they’ve turned into fighting each other, which is actually absolutely pointless. Both of them know that their religion says it’s all about love and peace and loving your neighbor as yourself and all the rest of it and they both say all that, but they become tribes, and tribes fight to preserve themselves and so on. It’s very, very sad, when we see the results of it now.
Roderick: I used to meditate once a week with a group of Catholics on a Friday morning and one day I said, “The way I was brought up was not to trust you people. In fact, I was brought up to despise you.”
Charles: Me, too.
Roderick: They said, “That’s a shame because the way we were brought up is to feel sorry for you people.”
Charles: [Laughs loudly]
Roderick: I do get a sense of continuing spiritual hunger, particularly in young people.
Charles: Oh, yes, absolutely, but institutional religion is not satisfying that. Absolutely, a lot of people are looking for something beyond this life to keep them going and to get them through and they don’t know where to find it.
Roderick: Do you?
Charles: Ummm…well…[very long pause]…No. I think I’m probably too rational or I come down to Aristotle again. I suppose… I’m into a bit of mindfulness, as they call it. I do sort of find a need to withdraw from the world a bit and allow myself to ponder the meaning, if there is a meaning, of existence. That’s why some of the culture of religion helps, I mean the music and so on, but also nature. I try to walk every day in the woods here, particularly in the early morning. It’s definitely a kind of religious experience or spiritual experience of some sort. You get a feeling that you are part of something much bigger than you that is internal. The leaves have all gone, but they’ll come back in the summer. It’s very hard to imagine that they will, now as you look at these skeletons out there, that they will be covered in leaves. I find that strangely reassuring. So, yeah, I’ll die, but others will come after me and the world will go on. For a few millennia, anyway. I’ve watched my young grandchildren gradually forming themselves into characters and I think that’s great. I should just, like the leaves, fall off.
Roderick: I’ve noticed if you look at the history of such spirituality and lots of different spirituality bubbling up, if you like, it just seems to me to go in cycles.
Charles: I actually don’t think you can capture the essence of what I’m talking about, an ‘otherness’.
Roderick: Maybe that’s how it survives.
Charles: Probably. And, so people make vague attempts at it and try to capture it and label it and give it names and people and so on, but I don’t think it works. As you said, that’s why it survives, I suppose, but it’s ‘otherness’, you know.
Roderick: You described your book, Myself and Other Important Matters, as a search for yourself. Did you find him?
Charles: More than I had. Writing is a great way of clarifying your thinking. I discovered in writing that book that there were large bits of me that I used to think was me but it was me pretending to be somebody, rather than me. Gradually as I got to the end of it, I got more sure of who I would like to be.
I think the interesting thing about getting very ancient, which I now am, I suppose, is that you sort of begin to discard all the other things that you thought were important; stuff and people that you collect which aren’t really useful to, and so on. You begin to concentrate down on the things that you think are essential to your life, which is nice to unclutter yourself.
Roderick: One notices in young people a high level of anxiety. Is there anything that you would say particularly to a young person in their 20s and 30s.
Charles: I give talks to youngish people in their early 20s and I usually give them this line from an American poet called Mary Oliver. She says in one of her things, “Tell me what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I say to them three things about that little line.
One is, “Tell me.” I am not, and nobody can tell you what you’re going to do with your life. It’s up to you, but I promise you, telling people helps to clarify the mind. Find people that you can tell, not ask, tell what you’re going to do.
Your one life is “precious”, so don’t waste it. Please don’t waste it. Use it, hopefully for the good of others in some way.
“Wild”, please experiment. Please don’t sit and do what your teacher told you to do. Please go wild. Particularly in your 20s. Find out who you are, and more importantly, who you are not.
I thought I was educated to be a successful manager. I wasn’t, but I had to try it to find out. I thought I would be a successful academic, but I wasn’t. There were germs in each of those things that eventually became me. So be wild, not too cautious.
Roderick: So, have you decided what you want to be when you grow up?
Charles: [Laughs heartily]
Roderick: Thank you for being so generous with your time.
I remember to take a selfie on the way out as we say our goodbyes. Walking to the train station, I pass a charity shop and see a small display plate with an ancient Greek design. I buy it as a memento of far from regretting meeting one my heroes.
[1] Geikie, J. C. (1903). The Fascination of London: Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney. London: A & C Black, p. 94.