21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges

One of our leading thinkers considers the challenges that life and the future hold for us

21 Letters details [Handy's] personal and professional experiences with simplicity and warmth

A real spikiness alongside his generosity of spirit and openness to new ideas. 21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges takes the form of lessons handed down to his grandchildren – interwoven with touching tributes to his wife. The great tactician is still thinking three hoops ahead.

Some of the octogenarian management thinker’s most thought-provoking ideas . . . about how to humanise business, soften capitalism, and live life better.

Charles Handy was a writer, broadcaster and teacher, as well as a former 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, Manufactures 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, Gods of Management, The Second Curve and 21 Letters.

Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management – including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management – have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends – such as Beyond Certainty and The Second Curve – has changed the way we view society. 
 
In his new book, Handy builds on a life's work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities the next generation faces. How will people cope with change in a world where the old certainties no longer apply? What goals will and should they set themselves? How will they find purpose and fulfilment in their lives? Clear-eyed and optimistic by turns, he sets out the questions that everyone needs to ask themselves, and points us in the direction of the answers.

The New Philanthropists

Charles Handy's books have sold over a million copies worldwide - this remarkable book of photographs and words reveals the energy and inspiration of a new way of using wealth.

Charles Handy (Author) Charles Handy was a writer, broadcaster and teacher, as well as a former 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, Manufactures 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, Gods of Management, The Second Curve and 21 Letters. Elizabeth Handy (Photographer (ONIX)) Elizabeth Handy is a successful portrait photographer. She and her husband Charles live in London and Norfolk.

Who are the new philanthropists? And how is their philanthropy 'new'? 
 
In this remarkable and inspiring book, the eminent management writer Charles Handy and his wife Elizabeth, a portrait photographer, have collaborated to portray a new generation of practical philanthropists, men and women who have made their own fortunes and decided to move on from financial success to try to help those in need. They are doing so not simply by giving their money away to charities and agencies but by helping actively, working on the spot with the very people who need their aid, ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable in the longer term. 
 
As in their acclaimed The New Alchemists, the Handys have both interviewed and photographed their subjects in order to tell their inspiring stories; from the Sydney restaurateur Jeff Gambin, who personally helps to cook hot and cold menus for homeless people; to Niall Mellon, a young Irish property developer who is replacing the shacks with breeze-block homes in a South African township; and Sara Davenport, who sold her art gallery and set up the breast-cancer care centre the Haven Trust to offer integrated and holistic treatment and support. 
 
This striking book of words and photographs reveals the energy and inspiration of these new ways of using wealth, revealing the motivations and satisfactions of such direct action.

Thoughts on Reinventing Society

The Second Curve

The summation of a life's work, in which Handy considers what the future holds for society.

The bracing manifesto of a forward-looking radical ... The Second Curve successfully channels the energy and enthusiasm of the younger generation, in whom Handy places great hope ... Handy’s prescience over the decades has earned him the right to dabble and, given his record, you would not want to bet against some of his radical ideas coming true.

Gentle but incisive ... [Handy's] voice is a reassuring, challenging presence. We should continue to listen to it.

Strong and original... It is impossible not to be impressed and a little daunted by so much energy and wisdom.

Wise words, succinctly put – the work of a master.

Still full of insights into the ever-changing world of work... Challenging received opinion, as he has done for decades.

A fierce manifesto for radical political, corporate and social change.

In this book Handy encourages us to think differently about organisational structures. He presents engaging, cogent arguments about the organisations that we know today in sectors such as politics, education, business and how they will need to be very different in 20 years’ time.

Britain's leading guru looks to the future. 
 
Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management – including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management – have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends – such as Beyond Certainty – has changed the way we view society. 
 
In The Second Curve, Handy builds on a life's work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities lie ahead. He looks at current trends in capitalism and asks whether it is a sustainable system. He explores the dangers of a society built on credit. He challenges the myth that remorseless growth is essential. He even asks whether we should rethink our roles in life – as students, parents, workers and voters – and what the aims of an ideal society of the future should be. 
 
Provocative and thoughtful as ever, he sets out the questions we all need to ask ourselves – and points us in the direction of some of the answers.

Women at Sixty: A Celebration

Reinvented Lives

In photographs and word portraits, a selection of very different women reveal how it is possible to reinvent themselves at 60.

Charles Handy (Author) Charles Handy was a writer, broadcaster and teacher, as well as a former 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, Manufactures 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, Gods of Management, The Second Curve and 21 Letters. Elizabeth Handy (Author) Elizabeth Handy is a successful portrait photographer. She and her husband Charles live in London and Norfolk.

Twenty-eight women, ranging from Anita Roddick and Prue Leith to less well-known names, write their own personal stories which are accompanied by Elizabeth Handy's black and white photographs and an introductory essay by Charles Handy.   This generation of women is entering the sixties more healthy, more educated and more energetic than most of their mothers.    The subjects in this book provide the models for what has become, for the first time, a new age for many women.    Released from most of the cares and responsibilities that accompany midlife for women, they are free to reinvent themselves, to give more time to their career or calling, or to luxuriate in the serenity and friendships that few had time for in the past. Some enter new relationships, some start new careers or go back to study, some find that their work is only now reaching its peak. Many have survived traumas and tragedies, but 'the past is just the prologue' as one of them explains.

The New Alchemists

'Charles Handy brings originality and lightness to everything he touches' Management Today

A rich source of inspiration for anyone looking to create something that changes the world

It offers lessons for us all - policy makers and parents alike

The world needs new ideas, now products, new kinds of associations and institutions, new initiatives, new art and new designs. But these new things seldom come from established organisations. They come from individuals - the New Alchemists. What drives people to create something from nothing? Is it ambition, the need for self-fulfilment? Is it to do with money, power, or even genes? Is there a mood of the time that encourages people? Can anyone do it? Charles Handy has talked to a range of extraordinary characters - from Trevor Baylis and Richard Branson to Jane Tewson and Terence Conran. And Elizabeth Handy has used her new style of composite portraits to highlight aspects of all the different alchemists in their particular environments. The New Alchemists is a fascinating and inspirational investigation into the creative and entrepreneurial process.

Understanding Organizations

The most important book on management and organizations for the past thirty years.

Charles Handy is now a writer and broadcaster, following careers as an economist, Professor at the London Business School and a consultant to a wide variety of organizations. He is widely regarded as the top 'businessguru' in the UK. UNDERSTANDING ORGANIZATIONS was originally published in 1976. He lives in Norfolk and London (Putney).

Organizations are a part of everyday life, whether in schools, hospitals, police stations or commercial companies. In this classics text, Charles Handy argues that the key to successful organizations lies in a better understanding of the needs and motivations of the people within them. 
 
Understanding Organizations offers an extended 'dictionary' of the key concepts -- culture, motivations, leadership, role-playing, co-ordinating and consultation -- and then shows how this 'language' can help us find new solutions to familiar problems. Few management writers have been as consistently challenging and influential as Charles Handy. Firmly established as one of the core business texts, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in organizations and how to make them work better.

Myself and Other More Important Matters

The bestselling author of THE EMPTY RAINCOAT and THE AGE OF UNREASON examines life's big choices - taking the format of his famous BBC 'Thought for the Day' programme to frame the key phases of our life.

[Goes] deeper into the heart of business than almost any book that tackles the subject head on ... A compelling, touching and finally inspiring journey ... To paraphrase TS Eliot, his remarkable achievement is to bring us back to our starting point - but allow us to recognise the place for the first time

Highly readable ... A wise work from which we will all learn

Handy at his best; humane, thoughtful and serious

His writing is both spiritual ... and practical: he makes you want to do something about your life, and at the same time convinces that you can, and furnishes you with some good examples of how to go about it ... So much of it will strike home ... Real inspiration ... excellent advice

Charles Handy is a true statesman in the field . . . a wizened dean of faculty for the world of independent thinkers

Charles Handy is perhaps best known outside the business world as a wise and warm presenter of Radio 4's 'Thought for the Day'. Long recognised as one of the world's leading business thinkers (over a million copies of his books have been sold around the world), in Myself and Other More Important Matters he leaves the management territory he has so effectively and influentially mapped in the past to explore the wider issues and dilemmas - both moral and creative - raised by the turning points of his long and successful life.Here he investigates the big issues of how life can best be lived as they have emerged from the unfolding of his life and his unique and influential understanding of what really matters. 
 
From supplying oil by boat to an area larger than England as a bullish young Shell executive in Borneo to realising that there was a big difference between describing the development of a 'portfolio' life (made up of a variety of activities for a range of purposes and pay) in theory and actually himself leaving behind full-time employment, from helping to start up the London and Open business schools to listening and talking to people all over the world about how they want to manage their lives, Handy's telling of his experiences proves both revealing and significant.

The Elephant And The Flea

New Thinking For A New World

'Charles Handy is Britain's only world-class management guru.' Director

'In this very readable book Handy makes you think more about the impact of these diverse changes on the whole world of human endeavour, not just the world of work.

You will find yourself constantly returning to the book and quoting extracts to collegues...This latest offering is a joy to read. It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.

This is an ambitious treatment of the future of everything.

It is classic Handy...It is entertaining, thought provoking, humanistic and wise in equal measures.

This latest offering is a joy to read.  It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.

Handy has that rare gift among business writers - able to talk sense and leave out the jargon - This title will appeal to a very wide audience, because it is everything a business book should be - very readable and thought provoking.

Bookseller Charles Handy's best-selling new book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how and why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations and issues including the increasing fear of big business: 'it is easy to see why many observers think that the big corporations are now both richer and more powerful than many nation states.  They worry that these new corporate states are accountable to no-one - that their financial clout makes governments beholden to them ... The elephants, people feel, are out of control.'

Thoughts For The Day

A selection of some of Charles Handy's early morning BBC Radio 4 ''Thought for the Day' reflections.

Charles Handy may well be Britain's only world-class management guru (Director Magazine) but his thoughts about organisations and the role of the individual involve thoughts beyond pay and display. For five years, Handy delivered a series of Thoughts for the Radio 4 Today Programme which addressed spiritual issues. These were collected in a volume called Waiting for the Mountain to Move, originally published in 1991. The distilled essence of Handy's meditations and advice are published now in a new, small Little Book of Calm format, in two colours and with b&amp;w illustrations. 'My concern is only to point to what I see as the meaning in things and to the ultimate purpose in life in order to encourage other people to find their meaning and their purpose' Charles Handy

21 Ideas for Managers

Inside Organizations

Charles Handy is now a writer and broadcaster, following careers as an economist, Professor at the London Business School and a consultant to a wide variety of organizations. He lives in Norfolk and London (Putney).

Throughout a long and distinguished career, Charles Handy has spent much of his time observing organizations and the behaviour of the people in them. Based on this rich experience, INSIDE ORGANIZATIONS is Handy's personal anthology of twenty-one ideas which will change the way people see their world, and help them to organize it better. It contains anecdotes, commentary and questions which challenge the reader and help them apply each idea to their particular situation whether they work in a large corporation, a school, a hospital, or a restaurant. Light-hearted yet profound, this Penguin edition of INSIDE ORGANIZATIONS will have a broad general appeal, complementing Handy's outstandingly successful work UNDERSTANDING ORGANIZATIONS.

New Thinking for a New World

The Hungry Spirit

An extraordinarily eloquent and original treatise on the discomfort that many feel as a result of the overriding quest for corporate profit and personal advancement.

The Hungry Spirit is the distillation of a lifetime’s experience, a personal recipe for what we have to do to survive in a capitalist society.

The Hungry Spirit is a wide-ranging examination of business and social problems … shrewd, scholarly, thoughtful analysis.

Charles Handy is Britain’s only world-class management guru.

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.

The Changing Worlds of Organisations

Beyond Certainty

We must not let our past, however glorious, get in the way of our future.

Over the last decade, change has accelerated violently. The Thatcher/Regan years were a time of certainty, when greed was good, more meant better, and the Western world rejoiced to see George Orwell's dismal prophecy for 1984 confounded. But there is a curvilinear logic in the universe. Prosperity cannot last forever. 
 
Empires and organisations must flounder. The world must be reinvented. We can now be certain only of uncertainty, and to plan for the future we must think differently. Compromise may be the way forward, and organisations must give more freedom to individuals to preserve commitment and creativity. 
 
In this challenging and exhilarating collection of pieces, Charles Handy, Britain's foremost business guru, takes us on an intellectual journey through a changing world, in order to see how we must adapt to make our future work.

Making Sense of the Future

The Empty Raincoat

If you are part of, think about, care about or are in any way influenced by the world of work, and who is not, this powerful and moving book is for you

A necessary and important contribution to our understanding of the way we live now

*Can you find the way to Davy's bar? *Do you know the Doughnut principal? *How do you make a Chinese contract? The changes which Charles Handy foresaw in THE AGE OF UNREASON are happening. Endless growth can make a candyfloss economy, and capitalism must be its own sternest critic. Handy reaches here for a philosophy beyond the mechanics of business organisations, beyond material choices, to try and establish an alternative universe where the work ethics can contain a natural sense of continuity, connections and a sense of direction. We are now a world of shareholders, but everyone has a stake in the future. With warmth, wit and the most challenging insights, Charles Handy seeks to turn paradox into real progress.

The Age Of Unreason

Thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable - Charles Handy presents his vision of changing relations in the spheres of commerce and the workplace, providing original and thought-provoking advice to the employee and the employer.

Handy's lucid, exciting, shocking descriptions...thrust us one giant step closer to understanding the new, “upside-down” competitive realities.

We will not survive unless we adapt to the way the world is changing. The Age of Unreason is an inspiring vision of an era of new discoveries, new enlightenment and new freedoms. It helps us to understand what Tom Peters, the American business guru, has called the new 'upside down' competitive realities in the world of work and of leisure. It is a book to turn your understanding of the world on its head.

Charles Handy

Offers wit, wisdom and gratitude. […] Charles Handy’s 19th and last book is not his heftiest. But it may be, in some important respects, his weightiest. These final breaths of wisdom sacrifice little of Handy’s wit, charm and storytelling skill.

Rightly treasured as Charles Handy’s books are, his most important lesson may be his life. This collection of short reflections on life, work and people… reflects old age, but its spirit doesn’t. Handy’s later books are only indirectly about business… but paradoxically that is exactly why any business leader would profit from reading it. Sharp insights abound.

Reflections on How to Live a Long, Contented Life

Over a span of seven decades, Charles Handy was, variously, a businessman, a writer, a philanthropist and a philosopher. Not even a stroke as he approached the age of 90 dimmed his intellectual curiosity or his immense zest for life. 
 
In this, his final book, written from the vantage point of a contemplative old age and drawing on his articles for The Idler he shares his thoughts on the big questions with which we all grapple: 
 
What things really matter? 
What daily worries should we learn to treat as unimportant? 
How do we become more accepting of ourselves and of those around us? 
How do we discover purpose in our everyday existence? How do we cope with grief and loss? 
 
 
Drawing in part on his own experience, in part on the wisdom of others, he sets out the principles of enjoying a fulfilled and contented life, and gently points the way to the practicalities of achieving it.

Charles Handy

Praise for The View from Ninety

A guru

A wise and gentle commentator

Offers wit, wisdom and gratitude. […] Charles Handy’s 19th and last book is not his heftiest. But it may be, in some important respects, his weightiest. These final breaths of wisdom sacrifice little of Handy’s wit, ...

A guru

A wise and gentle commentator

Offers wit, wisdom and gratitude. […] Charles Handy’s 19th and last book is not his heftiest. But it may be, in some important respects, his weightiest. These final breaths of wisdom sacrifice little of Handy’s wit, ...

A guru

A wise and gentle commentator

Offers wit, wisdom and gratitude. […] Charles Handy’s 19th and last book is not his heftiest. But it may be, in some important respects, his weightiest. These final breaths of wisdom sacrifice little of Handy’s wit, ...

Books by Charles Handy

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