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| Charles
Handy management
guru and the high priest
of fleadom |
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IT IS not easy to meet
Charles Handy. First, there is the interrogation
by his manager-cum-literary agent who closely
scrutinises your credentials. There is no
way you can speak to him directly because
his personal assistant screens all his phone
calls.
Even if you come up to scratch, it's almost
impossible to conduct a free-wheeling interview;
his publicist and business partner sets
the agenda.
You cannot take his pictures either - that's
the preserve of his personal photographer.
A careless shot could all too easily mar
his image, we are told.
Whatever happened to management guru-turned-social
philosopher Charles Handy, the prophet who
foretold the death of full-time employment
and the emergence of 'fleas' in the brave
new world of work a full 22 years ago? He
is the man who scripted the Flea Manifesto,
the philosophy of the independent worker
who carves out his own flexible, innovative
niche in a world of diminishing employment,
at the same time that Handy launched himself
as a celeb flea.
He was 49 when he chose to turn his back
on the secure but stifling world of the
elephant (large organisations), one half
of it as marketing executive, economist
and management educator with Shell International
and the other half as management teacher.
In 1967, he returned from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to design and manage
the only Sloan programme outside the US
at the London Business School.
Has Handy, 71, now reverted to the layered
trappings of the elephant world where he
spent more than two decades? Not really,
although it cannot be denied that he has
become a brand, a pricey brand that is as
much a triumph of marketing as it is of
his flea philosophy.
The two decades and more
of the free life have been used to construct
a unique portfolio life for the guru and
his wife, Elizabeth. It is Elizabeth Handy,
portrait photographer, who doubles up as
his partner, personal assistant, publicist,
literary agent, et al, and directs the course
of his working life, right down to the choice
of media interviews.
For a neatly apportioned six months of the
year, that is. That's when the Charles half
of the Handys gets down to serious work
- whether it is writing a book, lecturing,
broadcasting or offering consultancy. The
other half of the year is devoted to wife
Elizabeth's interests. Then Handy pitches
in to promote his wife's late-found career
as a photographer - from driving her to
assignments, holding the light diffusing
umbrella and also taking charge of the cooking
at home.
"I wanted to avoid a segregated marriage
at all costs when I decided to become a
flea," says Handy who laments that
the Industrial Revolution destroyed the
concept of husbands and wives and even entire
families working together. "I don't
believe it is necessary for couples to spend
their working life apart."
Living practically in each
other's pockets could, to some people, appear
as stifling as the organisational prison
that Handy fled. But the engaging author
of The Elephant and the Flea confesses that
he is more than happy to leave the business
part of fleadom to the formidable Elizabeth.
It is, he insists, an arrangement that makes
both of them happy.
Handy's fans might have a different view
on this partnership. His new matrix for
chunking life and work has resulted in some
avoidable excesses. Like The New Alchemists,
a photographic and literary portrait of
Londoners who "created something out
of nothing" and more recently, Reinvented
Lives, which celebrates 28 women who have
turned 60 and have overcome a variety of
personal and professional challenges to
embark on new careers.
Perhaps these are minor digressions for
the high priest of fleadom whose cardinal
principle is reinvention - for both organisations
and individuals. Everyone needs to change
and reinvent themselves to avoid death by
complacency. Irish-born Handy's forte is
looking ahead at the ways society and its
institutions are changing and, thus, turning
individual lives upside down.
In 1981, Handy predicted that in 20 years
time, less than half the working population
of Britain would be in conventional full-time
jobs; the rest would be either self-employed,
or part-timers or even out of paid employment
altogether. People would need to lead a
portfolio life - putting together different
bits and pieces of work for a collection
of clients. Everyone laughed at him. That
was at the height of the Thatcherite boom.
The doctrine of enterprise and self-reliance
held out the promise of jobs for all; if
not, there was always the socialist state
to fall back upon, a system that guaranteed
full employment.
As it turned out that was an illusion that
crashed in the wake of massive job redundancies.
Handy was proved prescient. By the year
2000, only 40% of the workforce in the UK
was left in full-time contracts. The soft-spoken
Handy is not gloating over this. What worries
him is that even now few people are preparing
themselves for the life of a flea. "People
now live longer and work at least a decade
more but I see very little indication that
professionals are aware of what awaits them."
Careers, quite noticeably, are getting shorter
and it is almost inevitable that "for
the last 20 years of everyone's working
life they will be fleas". The latest
figures of unemployment put out by the International
Labour Organisation (ILO) should lend some
urgency to what Handy is saying. The future
of work is indeed bleak, with an alarming
180 million people unemployed worldwide.
In just one year, the number of those out
of work, the ILO says, has shot up by 20
million, bringing the jobless rate to 6.5%
of the global labour force.
In Asia and the Middle East, where there
are no reliable statistics because governments
do not dole out unemployment benefits, unemployment
is more widespread and invisible. In short,
the faint writing on the wall that Handy
read in 1981 is now in blazing neon.
So what is the way ahead? Train to be a
flea, advises Handy.
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Handy
tips for India
India, for management guru Charles
Handy, is an exciting stage.
It is a country where so many
things are becoming possible.
It is a nation where a lot of
developments are taking place.
It is, he says a hopeful area
which can benefit so much from
the spirit of enterprise that
capitalism unleashes. And yet,
"don't repeat the mistakes
of Western capitalism here",
pleads the social philosopher
who tends to sound as Bolshie
as campus radicals.
India needs to avoid the selfish
capitalism of the US. "You
need to make sure the gap between
the rich and poor doesn't widen."
This is the author of The Hungry
Spirit, which was a critique
of capitalism.
Right now, it is important for
Indians to get worked up. "They
should be really, really angry
about corruption, about government
inefficiency." This is
a lazy democracy. People should
push the government to make
sure that democracy, along with
capitalism, works for everyone.
Handy, who visited Kerala a
couple of years ago to see how
global capitalism was working
in God's Own Country, believes
that the state is following
the wrong model of capitalism.
The individualist Anglo-American
type of capitalism will lead
the Keralites to seek their
future away from the state.
The guided capitalism of the
Singapore variety, on the other
hand, would make them hitch
their fortunes to their land.
But for that to happen it would
need an alchemist with the passion
and vision of Lee Kuan Yew.
Sadly, says Handy, alchemists
are rare in Kerala.
In case you are wondering why
Handy is interested in India
and makes regular trips here,
there is a link. His family
had officers in the old Indian
army and his aunt worked as
a medico in a mission hospital
in Hazaribagh, Bihar. But it
is the new India of interesting
possibilities that fascinates
him.
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A flea's life is tough.
You need a saleable skill, you also need
to market it, or get someone else to handle
that part. You would also need to reinvent
yourself several times over. It's also a
future of uncertainty and fear.
"It's risky being a flea. You can't
always be sure of new contracts, new assignments.
You have to accept that there will be less
money," cautions Handy.
In short, all of us have to take charge
of our own lives, change our working habits,
lives and careers every six to seven years.
The pace is quickening, and it's primarily
on account of technology. While there are
many who would become extremely successful
fleas, there will be a larger number of
those who will not be able to cope, however
much governments may try to plug the holes
by equipping the laggards with new skills.
At the recently concluded Ad Asia 2003 in
Jaipur where he was a special invitee, Handy
said he was worried there was so little
discussion about the future of work. Nobody
was paying attention to the law of disappearing
middles - the disintermediation that is
swallowing up the middle segment of whole
swathes of industries. For instance, in
the case of book publishing, the only certainties
are the beginning and the end: the author
and the reader. Everything else in the whole
chain of distribution can now be bypassed
thanks to technology.
Yet, there was very little focus on this.
Advertising, in particular, is notorious
for its short careers and it was, therefore,
disconcerting to find professionals oblivious
to the challenges ahead.
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| Charles
Handy with wife Elizabeth |
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In Handy's cosmos, both
elephants and fleas need to co-exist. Elephants,
of course, are the established organisations,
lumbering entities in business, government
or the voluntary sectors that have a settled
way of doing things. Elephants have formalised
systems and routines. They offer scale and
efficiency and to increase these qualities
they are currently mating at a frenetic
pace, believing the size is the safest bet
in a turbulent world.
But elephants, he says, need fleas - to
keep them alive, to help them make a start
and keep growing on a second trajectory
of growth even as the earlier one is fizzling
out. "Organisations are a bit of a
prison. They stop you from being a free
spirit and sometimes, the price is too high,
but I say thank heavens for organisations
because they bind us together."
Handy is honest enough to admit that even
though he celebrates the independent life,
he does so with some reservation. He sings
its virtues not because it is the ideal
but because it is inevitable for many people.
In fact, a world full of fleas and small
organisations, confesses Handy, fills him
with dread. It is a sure path to selfishness,
promotion of greed and a complete lack of
community feeling. The dark underside of
a flea-ridden world is the threat of the
selfish individual.
Handy is acutely aware that the independent
life is prone to selfishness and is a "recipe
for a very privatised society". Because
fleas do not belong to any formal community
and lead a life without belonging properly
to anything, a world overrun by independent
fleas and small enterprises can become an
amoral world.
We cannot forget that fleas ultimately are
parasites.
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