The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Charles Handy

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  A Personal Preface

  Part A – A Creaking Capitalism

  1 The Limits of Markets

  Too much was expected of them

  2 When Efficiency is Ineffective

  When too much of a good thing is bad

  3 The Baby in the Bathwater

  The essentials of capitalism

  Part B – A Life of Our Own

  4 The Age of Personal Sovereignty

  We are all on our own now

  5 Proper Selfishness

  Individualism can be responsible

  6 The Search for Meaning

  Life as a journey of self-discovery

  7 The Necessity of Others

  ‘I’ needs ‘we’ to be ‘I’

  Part C – Towards a Decent Society

  8 A Better Capitalism

  Re-inventing capitalism

  9 The Citizen Company

  A different sort of business

  10 A Proper Education

  Education for personal responsibility

  11 A Part for Government

  Government as servant

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  With his characteristically very personal anecdotal style, Charles Handy analyses how materialistic capitalism is self-limiting, how efficiency may be the enemy of a cohesive society, and examines the false certainties of science and religion. Offering a carefully considered and compelling alternative vision, the book challenges the status quo on everything from capitalism and organization to goal-setting and morality. With nods to Kant, Keynes, Sartre and Drucker, The Hungry Spirit is not your usual business tome, but that, of course, is part of Handy’s plan.

  About the Author

  Charles Handy is an independent writer, teacher and broadcaster, known to many for his ‘Thoughts for Today’ on the BBC’s Today programme. He has been in his time, an oil executive, an economist, a professor at the London Business School, the Warden of St George’s House at Windsor Castle and the chairman of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce. He was named Business Columnist of the Year in 1994.

  Charles Handy was born in Kildare in Ireland, the son of an Archdeacon, and educated in Ireland, England (Oxford University) and the USA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

  His other books published by Arrow include The Age of Unreason, The Elephant and the Flea, The Empty Raincoat, Waiting for the Mountain to Move, Beyond Certainty, Gods of Management and Understanding Organizations.

  He and his wife Elizabeth, a portrait photographer, live in London, Norfolk and Tuscany.

  Also by Charles Handy

  The Elephant and the Flea

  The Age of Unreason

  The Empty Raincoat

  Gods of Management

  Waiting for the Mountain to Move

  Understanding Organizations

  Understanding Schools as Organizations

  Understanding Voluntary Organizations

  Inside Organizations

  Beyond Certainty: the Changing Worlds of Organizations

  The Hungry Spirit

  Charles Handy

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Books would never come into being if it were not for a collection of people who thought that the whole enterprise was worthwhile – particularly when the author begins to doubt it. I must therefore pay tribute, once again, to my remarkable wife and partner, Elizabeth, for her continuing belief in me and for her encouragement to put as much trust in my own beliefs and experience as in the accepted orthodoxies of the time. To Kate and Scott, too, my thanks, for allowing me to use them, our children once, and now our wise friends, as occasional examples of life as it can be lived.

  It is standard practice for authors to thank their publisher and editor, but for me it comes from the heart. Gail Rebuck and Paul Sidey have turned a professional relationship into one of camaraderie and true friendship. Their patience and forbearance as I struggled to make sense of the things I was trying to write about was wonderfully sustaining and their astute comments unlocked many a quandary. They have mastered the art of being helpful without seeming to be critical, and have managed to make the creation of a book a thing of pleasure rather than the long trudge that it can sometimes be. I am happy to have this opportunity to pay public tribute to them both, as well as to the team of very professional people at Random House who back them up and who seem to take as much interest in my books as I do.

  I have listed in the bibliography the particular authors whose work has informed this book but I realise that most of my ideas come from somewhere else, even if I am not always conscious of it. I want, therefore, to express my gratitude to all those who have educated and enriched my life, by their words or example. That includes the many students and managers in different lands who have taught me as much or more than I taught them.

  Charles Handy

  Diss, Norfolk, England

  A PERSONAL PREFACE

  I AM WRITING these words in a room looking out over the fields and woods of East Anglia. It is an idyllic pastoral scene, just waiting for a latter day John Constable to capture it in paint. Old photographs reveal that it looked just the same one hundred years ago. Some things don’t change. In the village behind me, people fall in love, breed children, walk their dogs and gossip about their neighbours, just as they have always done. The great themes of life with which we all have to deal – love and death, loneliness and responsibility – are still with us.

  Appearances can lie, however. One hundred years ago two men scythed the crop on those fields at the rate of one acre a day. Now John does the twenty acres in one day, on contract. The small farm of which those fields were a part has been swallowed up in something bigger and a way of work has gone for ever. The people in the village don’t work on the land any more, they work for computer firms, estate agents or publishers, connected to computers and fax machines rather than the tools of agriculture. It is work that women and men do equally well, which often means that both husbands and wives are out all day. That is different. The houses have burglar alarms on their walls, when once on one here thought to lock their doors.

  The alarms are there because there are more things worth stealing in those houses than there ever were before. People are better off, materially. Some, however, feel that they have missed out or, if they are young, worry that they won’t ever get a chance. There are more choices of what to do, what to buy and where to live, but that doesn’t always make it easier. Although most of those houses look as if they have been there for ever, the people who live in them were not born in the village and their children will leave as soon as they are qualified. It is, these days, a transient community.

  Our village is a microcosm of society. At first glance, life often seems to go on much as it always did, but look more closely and change has infiltrated every part of it. Change is engrained in life, and most of that change we would be happy to call progress. Our cottage had an outside lavatory when we bought it twenty years ago, and no electricity. It is much more comfortable now. Life for almost everyone in the West is more comfortable than it was. Few things, however, are unmixed blessings and the free market economic system which made it all possible is no exception.

  Many of us are, I believe, confused by the world we have created for ourselves in the West. We are confused by the consequences of capitalism, whose contribution to our well-bei
ng cannot be questioned, but which divides rich from poor, consumes so much of the energies of those who work in it, and does not, it seems, always lead to a more contented world. I know of no better economic system. Nevertheless, the new fashion of turning everything into a business, even our own lives, doesn’t seem to be the answer. A hospital, and my life, is more than just a business.

  What good can it possibly do to pile up riches which you cannot conceivably use, and what is the point of the efficiency needed to create those riches if one third of the world’s workers are now unemployed or under-employed, as the ILO calculates? And where will it end, this passion for growth? If we go on growing at our present rate we will be buying sixteen times as much of everything in 100 years’ time. Even if the world’s environment can tolerate the burden, what are we going to do with all that stuff? Seventy corporations now rank bigger than many a nation state – will they grow bigger still? Does that matter?

  The apparent lack of concern about these problems from those in powerful places smacks of complacency. I am disappointed by the assumption that these worries are inevitable accompaniments of change and that time, technology and economic growth will sort most of them out. I am angered by the waste of so many people’s lives, dragged down by poverty in the midst of riches. I am concerned by the absence of a more transcendent view of life and the purposes of life, and by the prevalence of the economic myth which colours all that we do. Money is the means of life and not the point of it. There must be something that we can do to restore the balance.

  The fault, no doubt, is ours. We have allowed ourselves to be distracted by the false lures of certainty which are offered by the competing traditions of science, economics and religion. Science appears to suggest that we are shaped by forces beyond our control and might as well lie back and enjoy it. Economics offers material prosperity as the only universal goal, and, if we accept that premise, all else follows ineluctably, according to the laws of the market and the dictates of efficiency. Religions, too, offer their own form of false certainty, promoting the idea that if you keep to their rules, or trust in a superior power, all will be well, if not in this world, then in some imagined other world. Reason says that any of these traditions might be right, but our hearts revolt at the thought that our purposes should be so preordained in one way or another.

  Even George Soros is worried, he who has made billions by his juggling of the markets. Nowadays he puts much of his wealth into foundations designed to foster the open society in countries recently emerging from the state of closed societies, dictatorships or totalitarian governments. In a significant article in Atlantic Monthly in January 1997 he expressed his concern that laissez-faire capitalism was itself creating a closed society in which only one thing counted – material success. A truly open society, he said, accepts that there is no such thing as absolute truth. A variety of beliefs must be allowed to coexist and need protection. We must all be free to make up our own minds. Open societies are demonstrably more vigorous, more prosperous and more stimulating than closed ones. Capitalism, which was supposed to set us free, may be enslaving us in its turn, with its insistence on the dominance of the economic imperative.

  No wonder we are confused, and hungry for something else. My hope stems from a hunch that many people share these doubts and worries, that they know that life is not just a business. They sense that, maybe, it is love and friendship, a responsibility for others or a belief in a cause of some sort, not money, that makes the real difference to the way life goes, that it is, in the end, important to believe in a purpose for our lives, even though it may be hard to work out what it is. Most of us have modest ambitions. We want to live decent lives in a decent society, and, given half a chance, that is what could happen because we are all of us mixtures of good and evil impulses, of heart and head in the same body. If we trusted ourselves, and our hearts, a little more, and the dogmas of the disciplines rather less, we could regain control over the things which really matter.

  Nevertheless, confused as we are by economic and scientific pseudo-certainties, some clues are needed. Can capitalism be made more decent and its instrument, business, work more obviously for the good of all, everywhere? Can the wealth created be used so that all can benefit, not just the fortunate few, and can education be reinvented to give everyone a start in life and not just the clever kids? Can we look after ourselves and have a care for others as well? What rules should there be in a decent society and who should set them? What part should government play in all of this? What, ultimately, is the real purpose of life? There are no sure answers to that last question, only the one that each of us believes to be right.

  Beliefs begin when the facts run out. Nobody can prove that their beliefs are right to anyone else’s satisfaction. But when they click with other people’s sense of what is true, they can be very powerful indeed. I suspect, in fact, that the next great clashes in the world will not be between nation states, or between conflicting economic systems, but between belief systems, which sometimes get called religions (such as Islam), sometimes civilizations (India or China), and sometimes cultures (Western). If capitalism is to be our servant rather than our master it will be because our belief systems want it that way. Beliefs are always personal but they need not be private. Shared and spread they can change the world more than governments can. It is well, therefore, that you should know how my own set of beliefs was formed, before you start to read the thoughts that arise from them.

  It all started with a death, that of my father, whom I had thought a quiet and rather ordinary man, albeit kind and loving. He was rector of a small protestant parish in rural Ireland for forty years. He was unambitious for promotion, careful about money – careful because there wasn’t much – punctilious in his work and sincere in his beliefs, which were conventionally Christian. He did not have much to do with the wealth-creating part of the world, or with its products.

  By the time I was eighteen I had resolved never to be poor, never to go to church again, and never to be content with where I stood in life. I went off in search of fame and fortune, first as an oil executive in South-East Asia, then as an economist in the City of London, ending up, by the time my father died, as a Professor at the new London Business School, dashing hither and thither, the published author of papers and books, on the edge of the big time, too busy to attend to my family. ‘Until I was ten,’ said my daughter years later, ‘I thought you were the man who came to lunch on Sundays.’

  Then my father died, in the fullness of his years. I have written elsewhere about his funeral, but I was staggered by the numbers who came to say farewell to this quiet man, and the emotion which they showed. He had clearly affected the lives of hundreds of people in ways I had never imagined. He had obviously got something right which I had been too obtuse to see. And, in the end, too late for him to know, he affected my life, too.

  I realized that what one believes about life, and the point of life, does matter. I had put my faith, until that moment, in success, money and family, probably in that order. I still think these things are important, although I would now reverse the order, but I hanker after a bigger frame in which to set them. At other times, I think ‘why bother?’ and remember Cyril Connolly who, when asked for his definition of the good life, replied: ‘Writing a book, dinner for six, travelling in Italy with someone you love.’ That’s a fairly middle-class definition of fun, and fun, however you define it, should be an important part of life, but not the whole of it. Even Cyril Connolly might have got bored with his dinner parties and his Italian journeys, not to mention the very mixed pleasure of writing a book. ‘We are here on earth to fart about,’ said Kurt Vonnegut, ‘don’t let anyone tell you different.’ But, at the last count, Kurt Vonnegut had written fifteen books. That is serious work. Head and heart were pulling him in different directions, maybe . . .

  My doubts and confusions are not unique. At the end of his history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm concludes: ‘Our world risks
both explosion and implosion. It must change . . . If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.’

  What, then, is life about? And what is Progress? In seeking to answer these questions, I am going to be covering some well-travelled ground, because philosophers have been debating these matters for at least 2,500 years. But, as one of those philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, pointed out, we must all still work these things out for ourselves.

  Strange things are happening to our institutions. Businesses, where most people work, at one extreme are getting smaller, almost disappearing as institutions, but, at the other, are getting bigger than nation states. At the big end, this means that they are effectively responsible or answerable to no one except themselves and those involved with them. At the other end, they no longer have the same responsibility that they used to have for those who now work with them, rather than for them, many of them outside the organization. The old idea of property as the basis for wealth and power no longer works, when the thing that organizations think that they own turns out to be us. We, the individuals, aren’t ownable any more. As all the traditional structures disappear, we all inevitably become responsible for ourselves, more completely than ever before. We are ‘condemned to be free’.

  Organizations, as well as individuals, have therefore got to decide what they are about before they can decide what they have to do. A philosophy for our time is needed, both for institutions, particularly those of business, and for individuals who, thank God, are no longer the human resources of some amorphous entity but persons, each with his or her own life to lead. Yet we are not free to lead that life without regard for others. We cannot escape the connectedness of the world, not least because the more we concentrate on what we are best at, the more we will need the expertise of others. Self-sufficiency is an idle dream. Even those who cultivate their own organic plots need trucks built by others to drive their produce to market along roads maintained by others.