Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Charles Handy
Oration given on 13 April 2000
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Charles Brian
Handy.
Charles Handy’s ideas have been described as being “subversive”. Irish
by birth, he was born in Kildare in 1932, he has himself said that: “The Irish
are trained to be irreverent; we disrespect systems”.
“Subversive”, “irreverence”, “disrespect”, these are not the traits usually
associated with honorary graduands, let alone with one the bulk of whose
academic work has been in the highly respectable fields of business and
management. But it is precisely this iconoclasm that makes Charles Handy’s
ideas so stimulating. Not that it is done simply for effect: in a series
of distinguished best-selling books he has set about overturning conventional
wisdoms, yet, he says modestly, “I don’t think I have a lot of original
thoughts”. In fact his writings are peppered with insights that have
quickly been absorbed, if not always into the mainstream of ideas, then at least
into the vanguard of thinking on business and management.
Businesses, he says, should be thought of as communities, in which people are
not “human resources” (if ever there were a dehumanising term this must be it),
but real persons belonging to what is, or should be, a community. “If
you’re a human resource, clearly you don’t have to think about compassion,
honesty, love, fear - you are like a forklift truck, to be used, reprogrammed
and lubricated.” A business organisation, after all, is a human place and
all human emotions are there. Too often, however, “Organisation say that
success is measured by title, salary and car, but nobody puts on your tombstone
'He drove a BMW; he earned £60,000 a year; he was marketing vice-president'".
And, he says:
I detect a growing disillusionment with the market system. An
insecurity that drives organisations and mangers to overcompensate by
overworking and over-earning.
We have created a mercenary society. Getting richer and richer, and
bigger and bigger has become a substitute for not believing in what we are
doing.
So, what kind of people would Charles Handy like to see in business? As
well as professional competence, of course: “I want managers to read novels, to
go to the theatre, to get out and see what people do. I want managers to
slow down a little, to take time to step outside.”
It would be a mistake to imagine that Charles Handy’s concerns are solely
with the individual, however central to the scheme of things the individual may
be. There is also the organisation. In the wake of a series of
recent mergers, his suggestion that the world’s largest businesses are now more
like states than companies as conventionally envisaged is particularly timely.
As he points out, the sales revenues of General Motors are about equal to the
combined gross national products of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nepal, Bangladesh,
Zaire, Uganda and Pakistan. “My argument”, he says, “is that these
mega-organisations are like large countries, but the problem is that they are
not accountable to anyone. They are not accountable to their citizens.”
The answer to these kinds of problem, argues Charles Handy, lies in the
concept of corporate citizenship, one of the themes explored in his
path-breaking book The Hungry Spirit. And if much of this sounds more like
social philosophy than straight business management, then it is because that is
what it is. He is concerned particularly with capitalism, “the dominant
economic philosophy” as the world enters the twenty-first century; why is it not
securing better lives for all: “In what sense”, he asks, “is it right to say
that America is a much richer country (than anyone else) when some 30 per cent
of its people are poorer in a relative sense than they were?”
Charles Handy’s life has been richly varied; every stage in it is reflected
one way or another in his writings. The son of an Irish clerical family,
he was educated in England and the United States. He graduated in
“Greats”, an intellectual study of classics, history and philosophy, at Oriel
College, Oxford, a discipline, he says, that gave him the ability to think.
After college, he worked for Shell International in south-east Asia and London
as a marketing executive, economist and management educator, before leaving for
the United States where he entered the Sloan School of Management of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remembers that within one week
of arriving at Sloan he had met a stimulating, dazzling array of scholars,
people who ignited his fascination with organisations and how they work.
After gaining his MBA degree at Sloan in 1967, he returned to the United Kingdom
to design and manage the only Sloan programme outside the United States; it was
the London Business School, Britain’s first graduate business school.
By 1972, Charles Handy had become the School’s first full professor,
specialising in managerial psychology. Then, from 1977 to 1981, he served
as Warden of St George’s House in Windsor Castle, a private conference and study
centre concerned with ethics and values. From 1987 to 1989 he was chairman
of the Royal Society of Arts; but he is known to a wider public for his
contributions over the past fifteen years to the “Thought for the Day” slot on
BBC Radio’s Today programme.
One can trace Charles Handy’s intellectual, professional and, dare one say
it, spiritual Odyssey through a stream of books, essays and articles, most of
them best-sellers and many of them prize-winners. The Age of Unreason, for
example, was concerned with the implications for society and for individuals of
the dramatic changes that technology and economics are bringing to the workplace
and to every person’s life. The sequel to this was The Empty Raincoat,
which was named by Fortune and Business Week as one of the ten best business
books of the year. These, together with Gods of Management and the
standard textbook Understanding Organisations, have sold over a million copies
world-wide. In a more recent work, The Hungry Spirit, as we have seen, he
raises doubts about some of the consequences of free-market capitalism and
questions whether material success can ever provide the true meaning of life.
Now, increasingly, he lives what he calls a “portfolio life” - balancing and
mixing a variety of interests, together with his wife, Elizabeth (last year they
published a book, The New Alchemists, a photographic and literary portrait of
Londoners who have “created something out of nothing”).
One of this University’s more recent, but well-established, departments is
Accounting, Finance and Management. It has already a Management Centre, to
which several senior appointments have been made. One may be sure that
Charles Handy’s work will serve as a stimulus to that Centre’s endeavours.
Charles Handy shines as a beacon illuminating the best in business and
management studies. He is innovative, a specialist, yet with wide cultural
horizons, humane and caring, stimulating and entertaining. For all this we
are grateful, and delighted to welcome him as an honorary member of this
university.
Chancellor, I present to you Charles Brian Handy.