Charles Handy, who has died aged 92, was a management guru and social philosopher who emphasised the importance of the human element in business and of the sense of the company as a community rather than a profit-making machine. In these and many other strands of thought, he was a generation ahead of his time.
Handy's view of the faults of conventional large companies in the postwar era was formed by a decade as a junior manager with Shell International Petroleum, including an intrepid posting to Borneo and an unhappy stint in the London head office. In 1968 he moved to the more congenial milieu of the fledgling London Business School (LBS), which provided a platform for his pioneering work on organisational culture.
Handy believed that business worked best as a village - a social unit in which "individuals have names, characters and personalities" - and as an organisation in which management's role was not simply to issue orders and exercise control but to enable workers with different skills to function at their best.
He posited the "shamrock organisation", a trefoil structure with a senior core, a flexible workforce and a changing roll-call of technical specialists for specific tasks. Many of today's progressive tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic operate, perhaps unknowingly, on models developed by Handy in The Age of Unreason (1989) and other writings from his LBS years.
Likewise, many executives today aim for what Handy labelled a "portfolio career" - fulfilling different ambitions at different stages of life and leaving space for creative leisure - rather than, as of old, a career-long ascent through a corporate pyramid.
As for the recently fashionable business-school debate about "the purpose of the corporation", Handy anticipated that, too, when he wrote that "the companies that survive longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world - not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul."
Charles Brian Handy was born on July 25 1932 to Archdeacon Brian Handy and his wife Joan, née Scott, at the vicarage of St Michael and All Angels, Clane, in rural Co Kildare, west of Dublin, where they had no electricity until 1945. Charles was educated at Bromsgrove School and went on to take a First in Greats at Oriel College, Oxford, before joining Shell as a graduate trainee in 1956.
His parents, he said later, were "quietly horrified" at his career choice - "They wanted me to be a bishop." As he left home to embark for south-east Asia, his mother said: "Never mind, dear, it'll be great material for your books." Handy recalled: "I said, 'Books, mother? I'm going to be an oil executive.' She said, 'Yes, dear.'"
If he was never comfortable in conventional corporate life, at least the posting as Shell's marketing manager in the jungle state of Sarawak, where communications with distant bosses were almost impossible, taught him that "I could make a hell of a lot of mistakes and correct them before anybody knew."
He also enjoyed the camaraderie of a small team far from home - unlike his subsequent head office experience, in a shared office with the department title "MKR/35" on the door and, he recalled, "slots for two name cards beneath it. This, I realised, was what it meant to be a temporary role-occupant in a corporation. One day I noticed the name cards on the door had gone. Now I wasn't a name at all, just a number. This didn't sound very human to me, nor to my wife, and I left."
He moved briefly to be an economist for the mining company Charter Consolidated, and spent a year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the London Business School faculty, where he helped to develop the first MBA degree and was dean of the Sloan programme of one-year study courses for experienced executives.
His LBS teaching and prolific but highly accessible writings - always focused on people and in contrast to the quantitative emphasis of the management education syllabus elsewhere at that time, built fresh British influence in a field dominated by American business schools and bestselling pedagogues. Handy was a professor at LBS from 1972 to 1977 and a visiting professor until 1994.
In another life, Handy's charisma, classical learning and mellifluous voice would well have suited a man of the cloth, and he was indeed a regular attender at evensong, though he described himself as a "cultural" rather than practising Christian. From 1977 to 1981 he found an outlet for broader and deeper thinking as warden of St George's House, an institution founded in the grounds of Windsor Castle by the late Duke of Edinburgh "to nurture wisdom through dialogue".
He was also chairman of the Royal Society of Arts from 1987 to 1989. Besides The Age of Reason, most celebrated among his many books were Understanding Organizations (1976) and The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future (1994). More autobiographical in tone were Myself and Other More Important Matters (2006) and 21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges (2019).
Charles Handy was appointed CBE in 2000 and received the Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award for Irish Overseas in 2015.
He married, in 1962, Elizabeth Hill, a photographer whom he met in Kuala Lumpur during his Shell days - and who encouraged him to rebel against corporate confinement. Between a cottage in Norfolk and a flat in Putney in later life, they divided their work priorities and domestic duties on a strictly democratic basis, each taking precedence for half the year.
Elizabeth died in a car accident in 2018; Charles is survived by their son Scott and daughter Kate.
Charles Handy, born July 25 1932, died December 13 2024