Charles Handy Quotes

Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists.

The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.

We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.

Presidents, leaders, to be effective have to represent the whole to the parts and to the world outside. They may live in the centre but they must not be the centre. To reinforce the common sense they must be a constant teacher, ever travelling, ever talking, ever listening, the chief missionary of the common cause.

Competition is healthy ... but there is more to life than winning or we should nearly all be losers

In a knowledge economy, a good business is a community with a purpose, not a piece of property.

Forget land, buildings, or machines-the real source of wealth today is intelligence, applied intelligence. We talk glibly of "intellectual property" without taking on board what it really means. It isn't just patent rights and brand names; it is the brains of the place.

To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.

Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning.

The world by and large has to be reinvented.

Villages are small and personal, and their inhabitants have names, characters, and personalities. What more appropriate concept on which to base our institutions of the future than the ancient social unit whose flexibility and strength substained human society through millenia?

A consultant solves other people"s problems. I could never do that. I want to help other people solve their own problems.

We should see schools as safe arenas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents... for taking responsibity for tasks and others people, for learning how to learn... and for exploring our beliefs about life and society.

The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

Learning is experience understood in tranquility.

Purpose, pattern, and people, the three P's at the heart of life.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

The market is a mechanism for sorting the efficient from the inefficient, it is not a substitute for responsibility.

Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.

We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.

An economy that adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence-the Three I Economy-offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and environmental resources.

Why don't we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to them, 'You are unique... you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel'.

The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are- bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.

Passion is born of vague hopes.

Creativity is born of chaos, even if it is somewhat difficult to glimpse the possibilities in the midst of the confusion.

The 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.

Life can only be understood backwards but you have to live it forward. You can only do that by stepping into uncertainty and by trying, within this uncertainty, to create your own islands of security....The new security will be a belief that ...if this doesn't work out you could do something else. You are your own security.

We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational processes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison.

A leader shapes and shares a vision, which gives point to the work of others.

There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.

Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.

It is tempting to call for better leadership, but we probably expect too much from the leaders of the nations. Those nations are too big, the connections not strong enough, the commitment to the future not long enough. It is better to look smaller, to our now-smaller organisations, to local communities and cities, to families and clusters of friends, to small networks of portfolio people with time to give to something bigger than themselves. We have to fashion our own directions in our own places.

If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.

Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.

Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training

You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.

If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.

Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child

The companies that survive longest are the one's 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.

The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be.

The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

Profit has to be a means to other ends rather than an end in itself.

Talent comes with an individual name tag.