Charles Handy Biography Concept

Irish, settled in England, Charles Handy was born in 1932, having graduated from Oxford at Oriel College. He worked at Shell International in Malaysia and as an economist in London City at Anglo-American Corporation. After this first experience, he decided to make MBA at Sloan School Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in United States. Then he came back to London to coordinate London Business School, where still today is an invited professor. Nicknamed the manager philosopher, handy speaks about the emergency of a new era marked by irrationality, paradoxes and uncertainties, the titles of his last three books.

 

Management main contributions

For Handy, the organizations of the future are the “three Is” – Information, Intelligence and ideas. In those organizations, the demands related to people’s management are big – “The wise organization is already conscious that its shrewd personnel cannot be easily defined as employees or managers, but as individuals, specialists, liberal professionals, executives or leaders, and those people and the organization itself also need to have an obsession for the search of the learner if they want to follow the rhythm of change”.

 

Bibliography:

Some of the reference books of handy Charles are:

• Understanding Organizations (Penguin Books, 1976); The Future of Work (Basil Blackwell, 1986);

• Gods of Management (Business Books, 1991);

• The Making of Managers, com J. Constable (Longman, 1988);

• The Age of Unreason (Arrow, 1990); Inside Organizations - 21 Ideas for Managers (BBC Books, 1990);

• The Age of Paradox (Huttchison, 1993);

• Waiting for the Mountain to Move (1995);

• Beyond Certainty (Hutschinson, 1995).

 

 

Translated from Portuguese by Susana Saraiva, Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese translation specialist. Contact: spams@sapo.pt.