The Age of Unreason

CHARLES HANDY

Reviewed by Jack

When I ran my record store, I knew my product better than anyone who crossed the threshold because I have an innate passion for music. But when I moved on to selling business books, truth be told, I bluffed my way through conversations by detailing information about publishers or reciting an author’s track record. I would talk about anything but the content of the book because I didn’t have the academic background or the personal experience to discuss the merits of a particular book. The Age of Unreason was the first business book that spoke my language. And through it, Charles Handy offered me a way into business books.

Born and raised in Ireland, the son of an archdeacon and educated at Oxford, Handy spent over ten years with Shell International. During the 1960s, he attended the Sloan School of Business and met Warren Bennis and other cutting-edge leadership and management people who sparked in him an interest in organizations and how they work. He then taught at the London Business School for almost three decades, wrote eighteen books, and penned numerous articles. Handy calls himself a “social philosopher,” and from that perspective he advocates the humanistic approach to business that first appealed to me. In The Age of Unreason, Handy writes about changing, living, and working—the essentials to leading our best lives.

At the time of this book’s publication, in 1989, Handy declared that “the Age of Unreason is upon us,” that “discontinuous” change, change that is irregular and unpredictable, had become the norm. Handy provides the following insightful example of discontinuous change. When he started working at a young age, he was expected to work 47 years, 47 weeks per year, and 47 hours per week, or a total of a little over 100,000 hours. The generation following his works half those hours, entering the workforce after graduate school and working 37 hours a week, 37 weeks a year (due to training and extended time off), equaling only 50,000 hours over a lifetime. All that changed in one generation. Imagine the sorts of effects this has had on leisure, education, family life, and generally on how society ends up spending its time.

Handy says, “Now, for the first time in the human experience, we have a chance to shape our work to suit the way we live instead of our lives to fit our work. We would be mad to miss the chance.” To accomplish this we need to take the job outside the organization, because that allows us more control and we can make our work our own. With the change to 50,000 hours comes more time to take that control, and Handy reminds us to spend this time learning new talents, meeting new people, and learning new skills.

“The purpose of this book is to promote a better understanding of the changes which are already about us, in order that we may, as individuals and as a society, suffer less and profit more.”

Handy is not opposed to organizations, though he sees a gradual shift to a “shamrock”-shaped organization. Within this structure, there are three distinct groups of people who are “managed differently, paid differently, organized differently,” and are held to different expectations. The first of the three groups is the “core”—the qualified professionals, managers, and technicians. The second leaf of the shamrock includes the outside contractors who perform specialized but nonessential work, and the members of the third leaf are the temporary or part-time people. Handy believes that this third group is the fastest growing section as business changes to a service economy. Handy’s shamrock organization, visualized almost twenty years ago, is proving to be true today.

In keeping with his self-defined role as social philosopher, he applies the “shamrock” concept to schools. In addition to the existing schools, another lobe would feature an education manager who would create an appropriate educational program for each student. And the third lobe would contain a host of minischools teaching a specialized curriculum (independent art schools, language schools, computing). This type of school would be small, flexible, and focused on the needs of the student.

It is difficult for me to express how affected I am by Handy’s writing. Because there are so many books that cross my desk and populate the shelves of our warehouse, I rarely keep books on my own personal shelves. But I keep Charles Handy front and center. Tom Peters captured my feelings about Handy when, in March 2007, he wrote on his blog, “Put simply, he is one of the most decent and thoughtful and profound people-professionals I have ever known. We agree on many-most-almost all-virtually everything when it comes to the ‘important stuff.’” I certainly could not have said this better myself. Many years ago, I had the real honor of sharing a dinner with Handy. Here is your opportunity to meet him through this insightful, timeless book. JC

The Age of Unreason: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist, Harvard Business School Press, Paperback 1990, ISBN 9780875843018

WHERE TO NEXT? Here for how to implement your Unreason Here for how to communicate your Unreason Here for a business that lived through Unreason | EVEN MORE: Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles Handy; The Age of Discontinuity by Peter Drucker; Nuts! by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg