December 20, 2024
Dear Interested Readers,
Advice From A Recently Departed Compassionate Guru
Last Sunday, I was enjoying a slow day. I was sitting by the fireplace in my living room, which you can see in today’s header when I received a text from Marci Sindel, a former colleague, the former Chief External Affairs Officer at Atrius Health, the editor of the first two hundred fifty of these Friday letters, and now a person that I count as an old friend. In her text, she sent me a link to the obituary of Charles Handy.
I had not yet heard of his death at age 92 on December 13. When Marci had seen the notice she remembered how much Handy’s thoughts and writing had impacted me and the philosophy I had tried to use in my leadership role. If Charles Handy is not known to you. the first few sentences of his Wikipedia citation give you a little insight into how he ranked in the firmament of business gurus of the last fifty years.
Charles Brian Handy, CBE (25 July 1932 – 13 December 2024) was an Irish author and philosopher who specialised in organisational behaviour and management. Among the ideas he advanced are the “portfolio career” and the “shamrock organization” (in which professional core workers, freelance workers and part-time/temporary routine workers each form one leaf of the “shamrock”).
Handy was rated among The Thinkers 50, a private list of the most influential living management thinkers. In 2001, he was second on this list, behind Peter Drucker, and in 2005, he was tenth.
I began to read the business literature as I emerged as an organizational politician and board member in the mid-eighties. I accelerated my reading of the management literature—leadership, organizational behavior, group dynamics, behavioral economics, quality improvement, and human development— after I became the CEO of my organization in 2008. Marci was always a great guide to the business literature. She has a degree in engineering and an MBA from Stanford.
Over the years, I have sampled many writers who have impacted my thinking. The list is long and includes Peter Drucker, Daniel Kahneman, Jim Collins, Clay Christensen, Daniel Pink, Dan Ariely, Jonathan Haidt, Nathaniel Foote, Stephen Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Robert Wright, Malcolm Gladwell, and many, many others. That list doesn’t contain a host of influential physician writers like Atul Gawande, Elizabeth Rosenthal, and Robert Pearl. I have learned from them all, but Charles Handy is the writer/guru whose work has resonated most with me.
My first encounter with Handy was his famous 1989 book The Age of Unreason. I like the description of the book that you can read on Amazon if you want to buy it:
In an era when change is constant, random, and, as Handy calls it, discontinuous, it is necessary to break out of old ways of thinking in order to use change to our advantage. Handy examines how dramatic changes are transforming business, education, and the nature of work. We can see it in astounding new developments in technology, in the shift in demand from manual to cerebral skills, and in the virtual disappearance of lifelong, full-time jobs. Handy maintains that discontinuous change requires discontinuous, upside-down thinking, and discusses the need for new kinds of organizations, new approaches to work, new types of schools, and new ideas about the nature of our society.
As I read Handy’s obituary, I had the idea that many of us feel hopeless trying to come up with strategies to improve healthcare and the work environment as we improve patient satisfaction and outcomes under the threats of the MAGA era. Rather than having a negative outlook on the next four years, it might be a good time to revisit some of Handy’s ideas. His philosophies about the nature of work, the importance of humanity in organizations, and the opportunities that change offers are worth considering at a time when we can expect that our president-elect will advocate for big healthcare changes. We know that much doesn’t work well in our healthcare system now. We are embarrassed by our outcomes and overwhelmed by the increasing cost of care. Despite our scientific advancements and our outstanding facilities, we know that many are denied the benefits that we believe everyone should share. So if there will be dramatic changes, why not take advantage of the moment? Handy would tell us to look for opportunities in a time of change. There is hope in Handy’s worldview.
Somewhere in Handy’s writing, perhaps in his book, The Age of Paradox, I had come across his concept that everyone had an idea about the changes that had already occurred in politics, science, technology, world events, and even morality, that had come together to explain the present moment, the status quo. Handy contended that many could tell us how we got to where we are, but few people thought about or even imagined where we were going, and how change was an ongoing process that would in time overcome the inertia of the status quo. No moment lasts. Change is inevitable. Many of us see inevitable change as an impending disaster or at least the potential for a decline in the good fortune we might be enjoying at the moment. Handy was not a prophet of doom. He contended that we could shape the future. Handy was convinced that with thought and appropriate action that guided change, we could produce a better future for everyone.
As I assumed the leadership of a healthcare organization that was locked in competition with a very powerful competitor that distorted our market and left little room for the success of any other organization, including ours, Handy’s view of the possibility of a better future was a reason for hope. It may be time for all of us to shift from the fears and gloom of the post-election moment, and see if Charles Handy can give us a helping hand.
In 2016, I wrote a letter entitled “Anticipating the Future.” The post began with a reference to Handy:
I have been thinking a lot about the future lately. Years ago I concocted a quote that works for me by leaving out a few unnecessary words from a passage in The Age of Unreason by the British business guru and futurist, Charles Handy.
The future we predict today is not inevitable. We can influence it if we know what we want it to be…We can and should be in charge of our own destinies in a time of change.
Our biggest problem is not our inability to imagine a better future. Atul Gawande has famously said that our problem is not our collective ignorance, but rather it is our collective ineptitude. We seem to be unable to collectively execute a strategy for the future. The biggest barrier to that exercise seems to be the self-interest that traps us in the problems of the status quo. To imagine and accomplish a better future requires that together we manage our fears, self-interests, and variations in opinion to achieve the future and the outcomes that we say we jointly embrace.
Other writers like Jim Collins and Clay Christensen have also focused on the importance of managing change. Christensen wrote about “disruptive innovation” which was an expansion of the idea of “creative destruction” which is an underlying principle and reality of capitalism. Some progressive thinkers suggest that capitalism is a threat to social stability. Some project that capitalism may ultimately be a failure because each innovation or act of creative destruction leads to greater wealth for a few while more and more workers become unemployed or must shift to new forms of work for which they are ill-prepared. Handy could see the looming threats, and he argued that corporations should be more humane.
The link to the obituary that Marci sent me led me to the Boston Globe where it had been reprinted from The New York Times. The obituary was written by Glenn Rifkin and entitled, Charles Handy Dies at 92; Philosopher Envisioned Today’s Corporate World: Joining a pantheon of management thinkers, he embraced a humanistic path for business and foresaw outsourcing, remote work and a gig economy.
Between the title and the text, there is a picture of a smiling grandfatherly appearing Handy under which the caption reads:
Charles Handy, the son of a Protestant vicar, at his home in Norfolk, England, in 2019. The companies that survive the longest are the ones that possess “a soul,” he said.
I have bolded the words that most succinctly describe Handy’s pull on me. I feel compelled to lift more from Rifkin’s obituary and add more “bolding” plus my annotations. The obituary begins:
Charles Handy, a writer, social philosopher and management theorist who presciently imagined a brave new corporate world where employees worked remotely, jobs were outsourced and workers had “portfolio careers,” working for themselves and contracting their skills to companies, died on Friday at his home in London. He was 92.
You might say, “Big deal.” It is a big deal because Handy saw much of what is our current reality now thirty years before COVID drove people out of the office to work from home.
Perhaps one of the reasons I was drawn to Handy is that we are both “PKs” [preacher’s kids] who aren’t so sure as adults about the transactional nature of the religion preached by our fathers. Both of us have struggled to integrate what we were taught about religion as a child and our experiences as adults. Handy’s struggle with how to incorporate religion into his worldview is well described in what may be the best overall review that I have found of the significance of his business philosophy, an article entitled “The Paradox of Charles Handy” written in 2003 by Lawrence Fisher in Strategy+Business. In the article which appears to have been a source for Rifkin’s obituary, Fisher writes:
Mr. Handy says that he is not “conventionally religious,” but that through his upbringing…the relevant lessons of the great religions have crept into his DNA and his work. “When you grow up steeped in this stuff, your earliest inclination is to rebel against it all, and then you discover that it’s actually part of you,” he says. “I don’t believe the dogma of any religion. But I do feel that we hanker after a deeper meaning in life than just surviving.”
Further on Fisher writes:
“There is always a moral and ethical component to whatever issues he is raising, whether how to be a more effective leader or practical managerial questions,” says James O’Toole, a research professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. “He never takes those higher values off the table. I always keep thinking when he starts off that ultimately we’re going to get a Christian message, but he never goes there. He shows you that issues of morality and ethics are present whether you’re a believer or an unbeliever. It’s a very transcendent moral view.”
Rifkin gives a similar view of Handy’s reality of being the son of a protestant vicar in Ireland along with a 40,000-foot description of his dominant philosophy:
Mr. Handy, the son of an Irish Protestant vicar, brought a humanistic social philosophy to the business world with the unconventional suggestion that corporations were too focused on profit at the essential expense of the individual and the human aspect of work.
Somewhere in his autobiographical writing, perhaps in his memoir, “Myself and Other More Important Matters” (2006) [my favorite Handy book] I learned that his father’s congregations served English landowners and their families who were essentially “overlords” of the local population which was mostly Catholic. Further on in Rifkin’s article, we get a more detailed description of Handy’s early life:
Charles Brian Handy was born on July 25, 1932, in County Kildare, Ireland. He and two sisters were raised in St. Michael’s Vicarage, 30 miles west of Dublin, where his father, Brian Handy, was the rector of two small parishes. His mother, Joan (Scott) Handy, oversaw the home.
Mr. Handy left Ireland to study history and philosophy at Oxford when he was 18 and never returned to his native country. After graduating in 1956, he spent 10 years with Shell, mostly managing marketing functions in Southeast Asia.
In 1960, at a party in Kuala Lumpur, he met his future wife, Elizabeth Ann Hill, who worked in Singapore for the British High Commission. She became a successful professional photographer as well as Mr. Handy’s agent and business manager. The couple collaborated on several books…
…When Shell assigned him to Liberia in 1965, Mr. Handy, at his wife’s adamant urging, decided to leave the company. “You must be out of your mind, handing your life over to these people,” he recalled her telling him. “They own you.”
He accepted her challenge and [they] departed for M.I.T.
In America and while at M.I.T., Handy encountered many of the leading business thinkers of the day like Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Michael Porter, and Warren Bennis, but Handy had his own concept of how business should be run. Rifkin writes:
He said businesses should behave like communities or villages, treating employees like citizens who have rights and privileges and a share in the profits. It was just common sense, he reasoned, that people were more likely to be committed to their work and a company’s mission if they had a hand in shaping it.
Handy’s philosophy and the very similar philosophy underlying Lean process improvement came to me simultaneously. It seemed obvious to me that Lean was a management system that could translate Handy’s sort of thinking into actions that fostered the changes we desired. I had been fortunate to work in an organization that had originated as a community of healthcare providers seeking to transform healthcare. By the time I was surprised to become CEO in 2008, much of that sense of community and purpose that I had enjoyed when I joined the practice in 1975 had been lost. Handy’s writing in combination with the structure provided by Lean gave me a sense that maybe we could return to that original corporate mindset. As I look at healthcare now, I have a sense that further ground has been lost over the decade-plus since I retired. Organizations have focused more on profitability and less on mission. More than ever before many medical professionals feel that they are working “together alone” in an environment that is not patient-centered and creates “moral injury” and burnout.
Healthcare professionals working in an environment driven by more attention to the corporate bottom line than concepts aligned with the Triple Aim to improve healthcare are vulnerable to burnout and moral injury that currently seems to be a pandemic among healthcare professionals. If there was ever a time when we needed to give attention to Handy’s philosophy, it is now as the challenges are taken to the next level by the disruptions that President-Elect Trump has promised.
There was much more to Handy than the books he wrote. As previously noted, he had an element of the “preacher” within him. Two semireligious components of his career were his time as the “warden” of St. George’s House at Windsor Castle and his long-running two-minute “spots” on the BBC. Rifkin’s obituary and the Fisher profile of Handy paint similar pictures of the evolution of Handy’s unique blend of management skills and humanistic values. Mr. Rifkin makes the case that there was an element of the wannabe theologian in Handy. He writes:
When his father, the vicar, died in 1977, Mr. Handy was overwhelmed by the huge number of people who came to the funeral. So impressed by his father’s influence on so many, Mr. Handy considered becoming a clergyman. Instead, he took a job as warden at St. George’s House, a private study center for Protestant bishops, in Windsor Castle. he focused on social ethics and values, and these concepts became central to his thinking about business organizations.
He left St. George’s after four years and focused on becoming a writer. In 1981, he was approached by a radio producer to become a regular contributor to the BBC’s “Thought for the Day,” a two-minute religious commentary during the morning broadcast. The lone lay contributor among bishops, priests and rabbis, Mr. Handy reached a daily audience of many millions for the next 20 years.
Rifkin points out that Handy was held in high esteem by the brightest lights in the business world.
Mr. Peters, a co-author of the 1982 business best seller “In Search of Excellence: Lessons From America’s Best-Run Companies,” said in an interview for this obituary in 2022 [ Was Rifkin writing this obit two years before Handy died?] that Mr. Handy “was part of a small club that pushed relentlessly, albeit gracefully, to really get beyond the confines of the sterility of M.B.A. programs and deal with the fact that organizations are made up of people.”
“And developing people,” he added, “is what you do if you are a leader of any kind, from a Cub Scout troop to a giant company.”
The very respected and influential professor of business and author, Warren Bennis, described Handy in a 2014 interview. Rifkin reports:
“If Peter Drucker is responsible for legitimizing the field of management and Tom Peters for popularizing it, then Charles Handy should be known as the person who gave it a philosophical elegance and eloquence that was missing from the field,” Mr. Bennis, who died in 2014, told Strategy & Business. [ The quote comes from the 2003 Fisher article.]
Rifkin gives us a good overview of Handy’s best-known book, The Age of Unreason. He writes:
His seminal 1989 book, “The Age of Unreason,” which put him on the map as a management expert and provocative prophet, described the late 20th century as being in the midst of what he called “discontinuous” change — profound social and economic shifts that were transforming business, education and the very nature of work and rendering the past useless as a guide for navigating what comes next.
He predicted decentralized, community-oriented “federal organizations,” in which a small corporate headquarters served the needs of diverse and far-flung business units. The corporate center would retain key financial control, but the creative and production energy would lie with workers who were closest to the customers.
“The companies that survive the longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world — not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others” and “their ability to make people happy,” he wrote. “Some call those things a soul.”
Rifkin wants us to know that Handy did not write “how-to” books.
Mr. Handy was never prescriptive. In a field dominated by how-to books on management, he declined to provide answers with snappy, quotable aphorisms. Instead, he focused on how human needs and dynamics might fit into a corporate structure…
Mr. Handy’s work spurred many companies, large and small, to reconsider the way people were treated and to recognize that lifestyle issues among employees mattered to the health and success of an organization…
…“Organizations are not machines,” he wrote in a memoir, “Myself and Other More Important Matters” (2006). He added: “They are living communities of individuals. The essential task of leadership is to combine the aspirations and needs of the individuals with the purposes of the larger community to which they all belong.”
Charles Handy has given us many ideas about how institutions and corporations can be more humanistic. In Handy’s mind, the corporation should not view its employees as raw materials to be used and discarded. In his later years, he continued to write and moved on to imagining a future beyond today’s corporations and giving us advice about how to live a more satisfying life.
Handy and his wife developed an interesting relationship where for half the year they focused on her interests and profession, and for the other half of the year, they focused on his. He strongly believed that successful people should broaden their interests to include more than their work. These ideas and others about what we can expect in the future are the subjects of a book he published in 2015, The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society. Charles Handy may have gone on to his reward but he has left us one last message. The View from Ninety: Reflections on Living a Long, Contented Life is scheduled for publication on June 12, 2025. I have already preordered my copy.
As we contemplate what we can do during the next four years of Trump, I would advocate that many leaders within our healthcare organizations rediscover Handy and the approach to leadership that he preached. If we are to persist without “losing our soul” we must use this time to improve the work environment. Handy would tell us that we do have the ability to create the future in which we want to live. Change will happen. Let’s shape the changes we will inevitably experience into the changes that improve both the experience of care for patients and the professional satisfaction of healthcare professionals.
‘Tis The Season
My wife has been busy decorating our house for the holiday season. The tree is up, but it’s not yet decorated. We plan to do that on Saturday when it will be very cold outside. We will have a high of 22 degrees on Saturday and 14 degrees on Sunday. Even though the tree is not yet decorated she has completed the decoration of our hearth. In years past, she would assemble a “snow village.” It was a lot of work that doesn’t seem wise now since we will enjoy having our 11-month-old grandson visit us for his first Christmas. It will be an “iffy” task to protect the tree from his curiosity. The snow village would have been too much to monitor. Perhaps it can make a return in a few years when his curiosity won’t require as much monitoring.
It looks like we will have a very beautiful “White Christmas” because we got a fresh coat of snow overnight between Wednesday and Thursday. We still had plenty of snow as a base even after rain and temps in the high forties, but the extra coat made everything look quite fresh and gorgeous. There have been skaters on the lake, and I saw one very impressive demonstration of ice sailing. I hope that we will not have a messy January thaw. Every winter is a unique experience!
Whatever your holiday traditions are, I hope that the next two weeks will be a time of relaxation and rejuvenation for you. The holidays are the best time of the year to renew relationships with old friends and enjoy the company of family. My wish is for a wonderful time for you! Let’s rest up and recharge because there will be plenty of important things for us to consider and do in 2025. Happy Holidays!
Be well,
Gene
