Charles Handy, a writer, social philosopher and management theorist from Co Kildare, has died aged 92.
Handy died on Friday at his home in London, his son, Scott, confirmed.
Ranked among a pantheon of management thinkers that includes Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Michael Porter and Warren Bennis, Handy predicted organisational trends years before they materialised as corporate realities.
The son of an Irish Protestant vicar, Handy was born July 25th, 1932, in Co Kildare. He and two sisters were raised in St Michael’s Vicarage where his father, Brian Handy, was the rector of two small parishes. His mother, Joan (Scott) Handy, oversaw the home.
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At 18, Handy left Ireland to study history and philosophy at Oxford and never returned. After graduation, in 1956, he spent 10 years with Shell, the Dutch oil and gas giant, mostly managing marketing functions in Southeast Asia.
Handy went on to teach at the London Business School, Britain’s first graduate business school. There he emerged as a prominent management thinker and philosopher in what had long been a distinctly American field.
Fond of visual metaphors, Handy, in the early 1980s, coined the phrase “shamrock organisation” to describe what he saw emerging – companies with three integrated leaves: a core of full-time employees flanked by a group of outside contractors on one side and a phalanx of temporary workers on the other.
His forecast of a “portfolio life” – in which workers would pursue “a multifaceted, multiclient freelance career” while taking responsibility “for their own earning potential, personal development and general wellbeing” – proved prescient as the gig economy grew in the 21st century.
After his father, the vicar, died in 1977, Handy considered becoming a clergyman. Instead, he took a job as warden at St George’s House, a private study centre for Protestant bishops in Windsor Castle, England. There, he focused on social ethics and values, and these concepts became central to his thinking about business organisations.
He left St George’s after four years and focused on becoming a writer. His many books, which sold more than two million copies around the world, include Understanding Organisations (1976), Gods of Management (1978) and The Age of Paradox (1994).
Handy had homes in London and Norfolk, England. In 2018, his wife Elizabeth Handy was killed in a car incident in Norfolk. Handy was driving their car. In addition to his son, Scott, he is survived by a daughter, Kate Handy Jones; his sisters, Margaret Handy and Ruth Handy; and four grandchildren. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
