21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Read online

  Charles Handy

  21 LETTERS ON LIFE AND ITS CHALLENGES

  CONTENTS

  Introduction Understanding Life Backwards

  The Letters Letter 1 Things Will Be Different

  Letter 2 The Human Imperative

  Letter 3 Life’s Biggest Question

  Letter 4 God or What?

  Letter 5 Everyone Can Be Wrong

  Letter 6 Curiosity Does not Kill the Cat

  Letter 7 How Clever Are You?

  Letter 8 Life Is a Marathon not a Horse Race

  Letter 9 Who You Are Matters more than What You Do

  Letter 10 Keep It Small

  Letter 11 You Are not a Human Resource

  Letter 12 You and Society

  Letter 13 Life’s Changing Curves

  Letter 14 Enough Is as Good as a Feast

  Letter 15 It’s the Economy, Stupid

  Letter 16 ‘We’ Beats ‘I’ all the Time

  Letter 17 When Two Become One

  Letter 18 What You Can’t Count Matters More Than What You Can

  Letter 19 The Last Quarter

  Letter 20 You Are Unique

  Letter 21 My Last Words

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Handy is an independent writer, broadcaster and teacher. He has been an oil executive, an economist, a professor at the London Business School, the Warden of St. George’s House in Windsor Castle and the chairman of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce. He was born in Co. Kildare in Ireland, the son of an archdeacon, and educated in Ireland, England (Oxford University) and the USA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). His many books include The Empty Raincoat, Understanding Organizations, Gods of Management, The Future of Work and Waiting for the Mountain to Move.

  Also by Charles Handy

  The New Philanthropists (with Elizabeth Handy)

  Myself and Other More Important Matters Reinvented Lives (with Elizabeth Handy)

  The Elephant and the Flea

  Thoughts for the Day (previously published as Waiting for the Mountain to Move)

  The New Alchemists (with Elizabeth Handy)

  The Hungry Spirit

  Beyond Certainty

  The Empty Raincoat

  Inside Organizations

  The Age of Unreason

  Understanding Voluntary Organizations

  Understanding Schools as Organizations

  The Future of Work

  Gods of Management

  Understanding Organizations

  The Second Curve

  This collection of letters is dedicated to my grandchildren Leo, Sam, Nephew and Scarlett for whom the letters were written in the first place

  INTRODUCTION

  UNDERSTANDING LIFE BACKWARDS

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  The words are those of Mary Oliver, the American poet. They have nagged away at me ever since I read them, even though it is too late for me to do much about them. It is not too late, however, for you, my young grandchildren, or for you, wherever you are, who are contemplating life’s rich choices.

  Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, once said that life has to be lived forwards but can best be understood backwards. Given that I am now eighty-six and ought, statistically, to be already dead, there may not be much of the forward part left for me but there is a lot of the back stuff to understand. I know now that life is too precious a thing to waste, that it has to be more than something to be got through, but it took me time to see my future life as an opportunity not a problem. I wish now too that I had been a bit more wild, that I had stretched myself more, taken more risks, been more imaginative. But I hadn’t come across Mary Oliver then and her very pointed question.

  I have written these letters in the hope that my thoughts on life and its challenges may help you to answer Mary Oliver’s question better than I did. You are living in a very different world to the one I knew, but I suspect that the issues you come up against will not be that dissimilar. It is hard to learn from other people’s experiences, but my reflections may make you at least pause and think before you act, or, sometimes, think again after you have acted. These letters, you might say, contain all the stuff that I wished I had known when I was your age, before I went out into the world and had to make my own future, my own contract with life.

  I never knew either of my grandfathers. They died before I was born. Sometimes I wonder what they might have said if they had written twenty-one letters to me. My mother’s father, my namesake, Charles, was an engineer with, I am told, a lively sense of humour. He was responsible for looking after all the lighthouses around Ireland. A lighthouse, he might have said, is there to light your way and to stop you hitting the rocks, just like these letters. Those lighthouses don’t have people in them any more. Their keepers, and their children, have had to find something else to do. My grandfather, were he alive today, might then have smiled and said, ‘That’s life, you see, the same only different.’ But what will stay the same and what will be different? That is the question my letters will explore.

  THE LETTERS

  LETTER 1

  THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT

  I was recently given a tea towel to dry the dishes. It had printed on it a list of all the things that someone, like me, who was born before 1940 would not have known in their youth. This what it said:

  We were born before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, videos and the pill. We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ball-point pens, before dishwashers, tumble driers, electric blankets, air conditioners, drip-dry clothes … and before man walked on the moon.

  We got married first and then lived together (how quaint can you be?). We thought that ‘fast food’ was what you ate in Lent, a ‘Big Mac’ was an oversized raincoat and ‘crumpet’ was what we had for tea. We existed before house-husbands, computer dating and ‘sheltered accommodation’ was where you waited for a bus.

  We were before day care centres, group homes and disposable nappies. We had never heard of FM radio, tape decks, artificial hearts, word processors, or young men wearing earrings. For us ‘time sharing’ meant togetherness, a ‘chip’ was a piece of wood or fried potato, ‘hardware’ meant nuts and bolts and ‘software’ wasn’t a word.

  Before 1940 ‘going all the way’ meant staying on a bus to the terminus, cigarette smoking was fashionable, ‘grass’ was mown, ‘coke’ was kept in the coal hole, a ‘joint’ was a piece of meat and ‘pot’ was something you cooked in, a ‘gay person’ was the life and soul of the party while ‘aids’ just meant help for someone in trouble. When you think of the way the world has changed it is no wonder that there is a generation gap.

  It is hard to imagine now but until I was ten my family lived in a house with no piped water and no electricity. We used oil lamps and candles to see our way around and had a noisy diesel engine to pump water from a well in the garden. There was no central heating, only a battery radio, and definitely no television. My father had a car for his work but we went around on bicycles or on our ponies. No, we weren’t poor; my father was rector of a country parish in the Irish countryside. That was just the way it was then, in the 1930s, before the Second World War. I remember the day the electrician came to put a primitive wind turbine at the top of a tree in the garden. It charged up an array of huge batteries in a cupboard that then allowed us to have enough light to see our way around in the dark but still not enough to read by. It was a little bit of magic in our dark world. Five years later we were connected to the grid and everything chang
ed. I remember my father’s face as he brought out the electric toaster my parents had been given as a wedding present ten years before. He turned it on for the first time and, of course, overcooked the bread. Who could have imagined that the smell of burnt toast would bring such a smile to a man’s face as it did to my father that morning?

  Technology had transformed our lives. It always does and always will. The problem is that until it happens there is no way of knowing how it will change them. The internet was a great invention; nobody knew that it would lead to Facebook and Google. It often takes thirty years before the full implications of a new bit of technology reaches us. Today, as I write this, electric, driverless cars are one of the exciting new developments, but they are not just new sorts of cars, they will bring other changes in their wake. How, for instance, will we collect the money to pay for our roads when there is no more tax coming in from petrol and diesel? Will there be enough electricity to power all those electric vehicles? How will we stop our kids reprogramming the driverless car that we ordered to take them to school when all they may need is our password? Or, given that the cars will make it a priority to avoid colliding with humans, will those same kids delight in walking out in front of the cars with impunity, bringing our streets to a standstill? One thing is sure: the law of unintended consequences will have a field day.

  AI, Artificial Intelligence, will be in full force by then. Will it destroy jobs or upgrade and support them? Probably both. With the help of AI, doctors will have much more information to help them in their diagnoses. The doctors won’t be replaced, just virtually assisted. All those who now earn their living driving vehicles will either lose their jobs or find themselves upgraded to fleet navigators, supervising convoys of lorries or vans. They will be Individual Assistants to the Artificial Intelligence that manipulates those vehicles. My guess is that you can’t have AI without a lot of IAs. Secretaries are already being upgraded to personal assistants until they in turn get replaced by their virtual equivalents, who will still need to be supervised in some way. Self-checkouts at the supermarket may be a primitive form of machine helper but there is always an assistant nearby to help those, like myself, who stumble in the process. There will be many more who only stand and wait, just to help us thread our way through the automated world ahead. What AI will certainly do is change the way we work and live, with more and more parts of our lives organised for us by algorithms of one sort or another, from our refrigerators ordering our food on their own to our wristwatches monitoring our health and renewing our prescriptions.

  I worry about those algorithms. We don’t know who wrote them or what their motives were. Some low-cost airlines punish families who don’t pay to choose their seats by dispersing them around the cabin through an algorithm. US courts decide sentences with algorithms. Some lawyers claim to discern traces of racial bias but the consultants and firms that create the algorithms refuse to disclose the formulas they use, claiming it is their intellectual property. Algorithms may turn out to be the unnoticed controllers of our lives.

  Whether you like it or not, technology will change our lives and you won’t be able to hide from it even if you wanted to. The message from my own life, however, one in which I have seen huge technological changes, is that we will take the changes in our stride. What today seems fanciful will one day seem normal. You will cope, as I have done, as we all have, even the lighthouse keepers of my grandfather’s time.

  Forecasters predict that human skills will be confined to the Three Cs – the Creatives, the Carers and the Custodians. The Creatives will have the most fun and the most money, if they are successful; the Carers will be the most numerous because they include not only those who look after those in need, but also those who attend to our wants – in shops, schools, prisons, hospitals and any organisation you can think of. Then there are those who try to hold things together whom I call the Custodians. They include the executive part of the government, especially the civil service, but managers in every organisation will still be needed to plan and decide who or what does what and when. Even those driverless cars will still need to be instructed where to go. There will still be a lot of jobs, even more than before, maybe, but they will be different.

  The truth, however, is that I cannot know in any detail what the world will be like by then. Nobody does. All I can tell you is that it will be different in many practical ways. Change is always there. Exciting, if you are up for it, but challenging. The Romans knew that. ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis,’ they said: ‘The times change and we change with them.’ Or, going further back, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that you can never step into the same river twice because it has moved on: ‘panta rhei’, ‘everything flows’. Or, if you want one more bit of old-fashioned wisdom, you can agree with Tancredi in Lampedusa’s novel of Sicily in troubled times, The Leopard. Tancredi told his uncle, the Prince, that if he wanted things to remain the same then things would have to change. As someone once said, ‘The status quo cannot be the way forward.’

  What does Tancredi’s remark mean in practice today? The first thing that has to stay the same if we are to find any meaning in our lives is work – and paid work at that. Even if some munificent billionaire philanthropist guaranteed us all a basic income for life we would still want to have some meaningful activity to get us out of bed in the morning. Doing nothing would be a waste of our precious life. Nor would you be content for long with a basic minimum income even though I will argue in another letter that ‘enough’ should be all you need. Money is one indication that your work has been useful to someone. There are other indications, of course – gratitude, for instance – but I shall long remember the first time I was paid for something I did and how good that felt.

  But the way in which work is done is going to change hugely. That would be Tancredi’s point. For work to continue it has to change its form. In my day most work was delivered by institutions, hospitals, schools, coal mines, steelworks, businesses of all sorts, small and big, the civil service, the armed services. Society was a complex web of institutions. Life for most people was a sequence of organisations, each of them a preparation for the next. They offered careers that, in total, were expected to last a lifetime and be followed by a few years on a pension, often provide by the employer. I joined one of those businesses, an international oil company, Shell. They expected me to work with them until I was sixty-two, and on my arrival drew up a chart of the sort of career I was likely to have, with a range of increasingly senior jobs in a variety of countries. It looked exciting. Many years later I realised that not only did some of those Shell companies on the plan no longer exist, neither did the countries, at least not under the name they bore at that time. So quickly does the world change.

  No longer does any institution apart from the British civil service offer lifetime careers. Indeed, the average life of a business these days is only sixteen years. So how could they even think of offering you a job for life? Nor, any longer, even in the civil service, does any organisation employ all the people involved in their work. Long ago, in one of my books, I suggested that organisations would increasingly resemble a shamrock with its three leaves making up the whole. One leaf would be the core employees, the second the sub-contractors and the third the individual experts or occasional workers whom it would be costly and unnecessary to employ full-time. More and more work, I suggested, would go to the second and third leaves because they would be cheaper, would not have to be on the organisation’s books or in their pension schemes. Increasingly that is what has happened. Some would say too much so.

  What it means is that there is no longer such a thing as a secure job. There is no longer anyone looking after your future career as there was in Shell, planning your next move, the training you might need, even your medical requirements. You are on your own. Even if you are employed you will have to apply for any new positions that become available. Furthermore, once you are over fifty you will find those jobs increasingly hard to get. That is
why I started to suggest that what I called a portfolio life would be the best alternative for people in that age bracket. By a portfolio life I meant a collection of small jobs, some paid, some unpaid but useful. Increasingly, however, a portfolio life began to be the life of choice for younger people, such as you. Sometimes it was because they did not fancy the controlled atmosphere of the large organisation and decided to try their luck outside. Mostly they valued the independence of the portfolio existence, risky though it was financially.

  As one result, there are, as I write this, more people in work in Britain than there have ever been. At the same time politicians are puzzled by a decline in the amount of income tax collected. They should not be surprised; too many of those new workers earn too little to pay tax. Of one thing I am certain: life for you, all being well, will be so long that one day you too will have to go solo, or portfolio, if you are going to continue to work, as I hope you will.

  Tancredi was right. More people than ever are working for money, as they always have, but in very different ways. No doubt those ways will change even more during your life, with automation doing a lot of the drudgery, but I feel sure that our human need to be productive will endure. Work will still be central to all our lives.