I recently read about Charles Handy‘s passing in the Wall Street Journal. Given his age, it isn’t surprising, but it still fills me with sadness. I’ve been reading his books for over 25 years, and they’ve had a profound impact on me and how I view business and leadership. I’ve always appreciated that he saw himself more as a social philosopher than a management guru—an important distinction.
It was clear that he cared deeply about the world and the role business should play in it. While his books often helped you become a better manager or leader, their deeper purpose was to make you a better person and to encourage you to self-reflect. He aimed to educate as much as he sought to instruct. He was also remarkably honest in sharing his personal journey, allowing others to do the same in a field where vulnerability was, at the time, often discouraged.
“Go raibh maith agat as an saol a caith tú linn.” (“Thank you for the life you shared with us.”)
I’ve attached a summary I’ve created of one of his books, and here are a few of my favorite quotes from him:
“A sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.”
“… There is no such thing as absolute objective truth. It all depends – on the context, the perspective, and the starting assumptions.”
“If all your experiments with life work out well, then you probably haven’t pushed yourself far enough. There may be lives out there that you could have lived had you dared more.”
“If you continue to ask ‘Why?’ three or four times, you will eventually get to the bottom of someone’s often unconscious motivations.”
“If you feel totally comfortable and in command of your life or work, you may be mistaking the illusion of security for complacency. It is always dangerous to rest on one’s laurels, in private life as in business.”
“We, each of us, die a lot of little deaths in the course of our lives, I reflect. But none of them should deter us from starting again or from using that new start to make amends for anything we did in the past. Be brave; begin your new life now…”
“Two more lessons from life – don’t offer something you don’t really mean, and don’t fish for compliments or reassurance. They may not come.”
“Unless and until we can define what ‘enough’ is for us in terms of money, we will never be truly free – free, that is, to define our real purpose in life. We will, instead, be volunteer slaves to our employer or profession, subordinate to the priorities of others.”
“As with all philosophical questions, there are no right answers, only an investigation of the issues and the challenge to be clear where you stand yourself. If we don’t know where we stand on the big issues of morality and ethics, we lay ourselves open to those who want to impose their definitions on us, or to a laissez-faire attitude of anything goes. Both are dangerous.”