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At barely 200 pages, in generously large type and with some chapters just two pages long, management thinker Charles Handy’s 19th and last book is not his heftiest. But it may be, in some important respects, his weightiest.
Handy died in December, aged 92. His death triggered a widespread sense of loss among those who had been inspired by his ideas, but also gratitude for a lifetime of humane and prescient insights into life, work and business, and how to transform the dreary present of organisations into a brighter future.
He is unduly self-deprecating in the penultimate paragraph of The View From Ninety, when he reckons that “a memorial notice will be all that’s left of me, and a few photographs and memories”. There are all those books, for one, among them The Age of Unreason (1989), The Empty Raincoat (The Age of Paradox in the US, 1994), The Hungry Spirit (1998). Together with his public speaking, they established his reputation as a management guru and — his preferred description — social philosopher.
This book skews inevitably towards philosophy, in particular, the Stoics, and even spirituality, a late-life echo of Handy’s upbringing in Ireland as son of an archdeacon. It includes “A Letter to God”, in which he grapples with his doubts and concludes that while he expects to leave this world “by myself . . . if you can help me, I will be very grateful”.
More familiar are the well-aimed jabs at the straitjacketing orthodoxy of modern business and the self-interest and self-obsession of many leaders, up to and including Donald Trump.
“Run your organisation for the benefit of others, not for yourself,” he advises. Elsewhere, he suggests allowing employees “the freedom to make a positive contribution, otherwise they’ll make a negative one because that’s easier”. Good management and leadership, he says, are all about “finding the gift in others and getting them to use it”.
Touchingly, Handy alludes often to his love for his family and particularly his wife Elizabeth, who was for years his unofficial agent, publicist and conversational sparring partner, and who died before him. Overall though, as he makes peace with his end, he sounds pleasantly surprised he has managed to live such a contented life, in line with Aristotle’s precept of “doing your best at what you’re best at for the good of others”. The overriding message he leaves behind here is that his readers should not waste their opportunity to do the same.
Handy wrote, or, more accurately, dictated, many of these brief reflections for The Idler magazine after a stroke in 2019 deprived him of the ability to use a keyboard easily. His publisher offers an apologetic afterword to fans who “may detect an occasional lack of final polish” in some of them. But, while some of the ideas are slighter than others, these final breaths of wisdom sacrifice little of Handy’s wit, charm and storytelling skill.
Near the start of his path towards a portfolio life (another idea that he pioneered), Handy’s first employer, oil company Shell International, dropped him into a management role in the middle of the Borneo jungle. He writes how, in search of guidance, he bought a pile of American management books but was “appalled at how badly written they were, and how boring”. Handy’s final work is a reminder that, even as his forces faded, the author remained innocent of both charges.
The View From Ninety: Reflections on How to Live a Long, Contented Life by Charles Handy Hutchison Heinemann £16.99, 208 pages
Andrew Hill is the FT’s senior business writer
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