Issue No. 154 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting asks why would anyone want to read your autobiography? After reading Charles Handy’s book this week, I was inspired, educated and encouraged. His book delivers some memorable management stories to share at your next staff meeting. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Charles Handy, Guru
Absolutely fascinating. Charles Handy, often called the “Peter Drucker of the United Kingdom,” (though he’s much more than that) has penned a page-turner autobiography. If you’re over 50, it’s must-reading. In between his short, crisp management meanderings, he dispenses wisdom on the “portfolio” life—why your middle and later years might be better invested on your own versus at the whims of an organization. (Attention all wanna-be consultants!)
Under 50? Then I’d suggest it’s required reading. You’ll be shocked—and educated—when you discover that Britain had no books on management in the 1950s (none). And no business schools until he co-founded the London Business School in 1967 (after a year at MIT’s Sloan). “Business…was long seen by the British as a lower status occupation, definitely inferior to the armed services.” His thoughts about America, flavored with his peculiar “cultural Christian” insights (his father was a Church of Ireland minister) will intrigue you.
While paradigm-changing concepts like the shamrock organization, the sigmoid curve, “doughnuts,” and the “portfolio worker” elevated him to management guru status, his humility is remarkable. He said that Drucker “once quipped that journalists only came up with the word [guru] because ‘charlatan’ was too long for a headline.”
Handy’s written 14 books, including his classics Understanding Organizations, The Future of Work, Gods of Management, and The Age of Unreason. While this book is autobiographical, his professor/consultant bent pops out on every page. His early employer, Shell, became big fans of Douglas McGregor’s 1960 book, The Human Side of Enterprise. Of McGregor’s two styles of leadership, Theory X (people need to be told what to do) and Theory Y (people can act responsibly on their own initiative), Shell decreed that “they would be a Theory Y organization, unaware, presumably, of the confusion they caused by using Theory X to implement Theory Y. Old habits die hard.” That’s just one anecdote in a feast of memorable management stories, with wisdom and dry wit thrown in at no extra charge.
I can’t resist adding one more. Later in life, he limited his speaking engagements to five per year for fees and five for expenses only (never in the summer). Handy’s wife, Elizabeth, handled his bookings. When asked to speak in Calcutta for the British Council, the proposed fee was minimal. “Pay him nothing,” Elizabeth suggested. “But you must have all the right connections, so could you arrange for us to have an hour alone with each of the four most interesting people in Calcutta?” The result?
“So it was that we met privately and personally with the chief minister, who turned out to be a jovial Marxist, with Mother Teresa, surrounded by her nuns, the vice-chancellor of the university and a prominent local artist. Money can’t buy that kind of experience.”
To order this book from Amazon, click on this title: Myself and Other More Important Matters, by Charles Handy.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Why would anyone want to read your autobiography?
2) This week’s assignment: research the management concepts of Charles Handy and then next week share what you learned about the S-shaped sigmoid curve and plot where our organization is on that diagram.
Return on Design - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Printing Bucket, Chapter 19, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to use print deadlines to burn the fuzz off your organization’s blue sky plans that otherwise would rarely be committed to the printed page (or the website). Ditto for design. Think it out—write it down.
Seth Godin, the guru marketing author, recently suggested that organizations take a closer look at “return on design.” There are four zones: 1) Negative return, 2) No impact, 3) Positive return, and 4) The whole thing. He writes, “I find it's more useful to look at them as distinct states as opposed to a graduated line, because it's easy to spend a lot of time and money on design but not move up in benefits the way you might expect.” Click here to read his blog on this subject.
On the Buckets website, you’ll find some rarely-mentioned resources for improving your critical competencies in the Printing Bucket—and ways to leverage that bucket for organizational health.
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