Organisations focus so much on efficiency that they fail to be effective, according to Charles Handy
has been through a lot of challenges in a long career as a manager at Royal Dutch Shell, an oil giant, followed by a spell in academia and acclaim as a business writer championing more flexible, less hierarchical organisations. His latest battle is with his health. Earlier this year, the then 86-year-old Irishman suffered a stroke which meant that he had to learn to walk, talk and even swallow all over again.
The drive for efficiency can also seem callous. Mr Handy argues that managers tend to like things more than they like people. If all the staff were replaced by robots, he says, running a business would be a lot easier. As it is, there is a temptation to try to turn people into things by calling them “human resources”.
Leadership also involves letting subordinates learn for themselves. When he started work for Shell, he was running the firm’s oil business in Sarawak, Malaysia. He had studied Greek and Latin at university and knew nothing about business or energy. There was no telephone link to the regional office in Singapore, and letters took weeks to arrive. No senior manager felt inclined to visit.
Because of this, he thinks that business schools need to change. What they tend to do at the moment is encapsulate the best practices of current businesses, codify them and pass them on. But the real challenge that business-school graduates will face is dealing with the unexpected. That cannot be taught in the classroom but needs to be experienced in the outside world. So students should spend time at small businesses or community projects, and then write a report on how they coped.
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