Dr.Charles HANDY: founder of London Business School

Charles Handy - organizational and social development guru, Motivation Calculus theory, and modern ideas about work, fulfilment, globalization and life purpose

Charles Handy is regarded by many as the most advanced management thinker in the world. His early work, such as his 'Motivation Calculus' outlined below, has been steadily surpassed and extended by his more recent modern and sophisticated thinking about the purpose of work, business and organizations.
Handy was born in 1932 and is popularly regarded as Britain's greatest management visionary. He graduated from Oxford and worked for Shell International, and during two years at the Sloan School of Management became a protégé of Warren Bennis, the organizational and leadership guru.
Handy's first book, Understanding Organisations (1976, revised 1991) is well regarded. Gods Of Management (1978), is another highly regarded work, in which Handy uses a metaphor of the Greek Gods to explain different organizational cultures:

• Zeus (power, patriarchy, 'the club' culture)
• Apollo (order, reason, bureaucracy, the 'rôle' culture)
• Athena (expertise, wisdom, meritocracy, 'task' culture)
• Dionysus (individualism, professionalism, non-corporate, existentialist culture)

In the 1980's Charles Handy developed his thinking and writing on modern living and working in The Future Of Work (1984) and The Age Of Unreason (1989), which pioneered new ideas about the value of knowledge and self-determination.
Handy was one of the first to identify that 'careers for life' were destined to become a thing of the past, and as a thinker Handy seems able to predict trends and changes on a global and fundamental scale. He is visionary, rather than an analyst, and sees huge, 'big pictures' and trends, rather than small effects and details.
His book, The Making Of Managers (1988), jointly written with John Constable, criticised and advocated radical improvements to UK management standards, which gave rise to the Management Charter Initiative.
In the 1990's and 2000's Charles Handy increasingly focused on ethical and philosophical issues for business and society, as reflected in Inside Organisations (1990) and in his collection of observations, Waiting For The Mountain To Move (1991).
The Hungry Spirit (1997) can be seen to predict the zeitgeist of the early 2000's in which increasing numbers of people and leaders seek more fulfilling solutions to organizational purpose, against a background of globalization imbalances and conflicts affecting humankind, resulting from decades of corporate and individual greed enabled by unfettered free-market economics.
Later books include The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future (1994), and The New Alchemists: How Visionary People Make Something out of Nothing (1999), which further demonstrate Handy's capability and reputation as one of the great modern organisational commentators, and someone who sees far beyond the world of business.
Charles Handy's works are generally philsophical and insightful, rather than stacked with modular theories and diagrams, and as such will tend to appeal to intuitive humanitarian thinkers perhaps more than structured process-oriented types.
Here is a rare example of a Handy 'model' from his earlier writings, included especially because it illustrates his focus on the human individual perspective.

charles handy - motivation calculus

Charles Handy's Motivation Calculus is an extension of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and an example of Handy's early clarity and interpretation of the human condistion and response to work.
The simple model addresses cognitive and external reference points in a way that Maslow's original Hierarchy of Needs five-level model of does not. Handy's Motivation Calculus attempts to cater for complexities and variations in people's situations beyond the reach of the original Hierarchy of Needs model. Briefly this is Handy's Motivation Calculus, which implies that our motivation is driven by a more complex series of needs than 'needs' alone, that is, our own interpretations and assessments form additional layers determining and determined by our response to our own needs and the effects of those responses:
Needs - Maslow Hierarchy of Needs factors, personality characteristics, current work environment, outside pressures and influences.
Results - we must be able to measure the effect of what our additional efforts, resulting from motivation, will produce.
Effectiveness - we decide whether the results we have achieved meet the needs that we feel.

PORTFOLIO CAREERS: risk management

Portfolio Careers:
Creating a Career of Multiple Part-Time Jobs

by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
Is it the career of the future or a passing fad? Will workers and employers in the U.S. embrace the concept as strongly as in Europe? Is it right for you?
The "it" is a portfolio career, in which instead of working a traditional full-time job, you work multiple part-time jobs (including part-time employment, temporary jobs, freelancing, and self-employment) with different employers that when combined are the equivalent of a full-time position. Portfolio careers offer more flexibility, variety, and freedom, but also require organizational skills as well as risk tolerance.

Portfolio careers are usually built around a collection of skills and interests, though the only consistent theme is one of career self-management. With a portfolio career you no longer have one job, one employer, but multiple jobs and employers within one or more professions.

Most experts attribute the concept of portfolio careers to management guru Charles Handy, who in the early 1990s predicted that workers will be more actively in control of their careers by working lots of small jobs instead of one big one.
And in his book, Job Shift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, William Bridges states that the lack of job security in today's workplace means that we are all temporary workers and that "all jobs in today's economy are temporary." And most other experts agree that the time is right for a rapid increase in portfolio careers -- especially among baby boomers searching for more challenges at the end of traditional careers.
An example of a person with a portfolio career is an accountant who works two days a week with one employer, teaches part-time at a local college, and has a consulting or tax practice on the side. But the jobs don't all have to use the same skills. For example, the accountant might also be an avid collector who spends two days a week selling his wares at the flea market. Or perhaps he/she serves on one or two corporate or advisory boards.
The reasons for considering a portfolio career are many. Some do it seeking a better work/life balance. Some do it for the variety and use of multiple skill sets. Some do it for the autonomy so that they -- rather than some corporate employer -- control their fate. Some do it to gain freedom form corporate agendas and politics. Some do it to follow multiple passions or for personal growth and fulfillment. Some do it for the pace and constant change. And some do it as a second career after retiring early from full-time employment, seeking new challenges and greater fulfillment.
But establishing and managing a portfolio career is not easy for many. Deciding on the types of jobs to seek, finding employers willing to hire, balancing competing demands for time, and managing the effort are key drawbacks mentioned. There's also the loss of benefits, possible drop in earnings, higher levels of uncertainty, lack of a regular routine, and feelings of isolation.
In one study of portfolio careerists (conducted by exec-appointments.com) -- executives who had left employers and gone into early retirement -- the majority, about two-thirds, reported they were very satisfied or satisfied with their success in establishing a portfolio career. The most rewarding aspects of a portfolio career were the ability to control own activities (27 percent), variety and unpredictability (21 percent), and freedom from corporate politics (19 percent). The biggest drawbacks include: difficulty in finding suitable roles (32 percent), uncertainty (25 percent), and constant need to network (21 percent). And not surprisingly, the two most important elements to their success were networking (57 percent) and self-marketing (20 percent).