But it is driven by deeper economic trends: insecurity about unemployment, and a sense that employers have reneged on a contract. Companies now talk about "employability", and recognise no obligation beyond offering their staff opportunities to upgrade their skills. Working for a corporation has become a precarious business, in which individuals may at any time be found wanting. But Handy believes that if he could get most people alone in his barn-room, being honest, then they would acknowledge the truth of its sentiments. "If that sort of thing wasn't seen as wimpish or pathetic or religious or something, if that was the general ethic in society, it would be a better place." It's what all the downshifters are saying.CONSUMPTION was once a word with only negative connotations, used until the 1920s to describe tuberculosis, the most deadly disease of the day But by 1929, all that had changed. "They don't disagree, but they don't do anything about it."He and Elizabeth meanwhile have what they call a doctrine of enough, an essential requirement for any downshifter.
They sit down at the beginning of the year, decide how much they need to earn and how to do it, then turn down everything beyond that.On his desk, Handy keeps a piece of paper on which is printed a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived; this is to have succeeded." This could seem sentimental, if not allied with a tough intelligence. He has tried to persuade trade union leaders that their current business, protecting people with jobs, is a diminishing market, and they would be better off repositioning themselves as agents (rather like the agency that now leases out Andy Blackford's services), negotiating contracts, helping workers position themselves in the market. Handy replies that electricians and plumbers have always been portfolio workers - and that while it is necessary to have a skill, skills can be acquired. His critics often argue that it's one thing for him to advocate this kind of life; quite another for an unemployed steelworker to try it. "I write about business as if human beings mattered," he says.
"That value stuff doesn't appeal to everybody, but it's why my books have been read outside the business community." Although not formally religious, Handy has a sense of the numinousness of things. And in a culture in which people are increasingly impatient of each other for not working as fast as computers, and in which there's increasingly little time for friendship except with those who are useful, his sense that "there's a force for good in all of us and also a force for evil, which doesn't mean there's a supreme being, only that I'm capable of being more than I'm being" is consolation of a kind.He can sometimes seem to be generalising from excitement about his own situation. At a time when we seem to be stuck with market economics, a man who has spent his whole life improving companies confronts the brutality of the system. And four years later, having written The Age Of Unreason, he left to live according to the principles he was advocating for others, relying on his skills rather than the security of a job.Handy's appeal is that he offers a capitalist's critique of capitalism.
He took a job running St George's House, Windsor, a centre funded by the Anglican church to bring together all sorts of people to discuss social issues. It was only when he saw how deeply he was mourned that he began to acknowledge for himself (of course, he understood these things in theory) other definitions of success. Handy had been "disappointed" in his father, a man who had lived very quietly. So Handy joined the one-year MBA course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up something similar at the fledgling London Business School and in 1972 became a full professor And then his father died.
He joined Shell after Oxford and was sent to the Far East, where "the first thing they gave me was the pension book I was so pleased. But what I'd actually done was to hand my life over, and my success." There he met Elizabeth, an army officer's daughter working at the British embassy in Kuala Lumpur, who made plain her distaste for being an expat company wife. But actually, he can't help looking for the potential: "It's partly my education and background."Handy was born in Kildare in 1932, the son of a Church of Ireland vicar whose thoroughly downshifted life ("meat once a week, a vicarage we couldn't afford to heat") convinced him he wanted lots of money and no religion. He insists that in the coming "knowledge economy" - in which information is the crucial tradeable commodity, "intelligence isn't rationed, and education doesn't have to be. We can create wealth for everybody." He thinks it isn't helpful to be too pessimistic (and of course, if you are in the business of selling books, what people want is solutions). People said, 'It's all very well for you, Charles Handy'." But he refuses to be cast into despair by the possibility of a two-tier world, a few international rich at the top, a mass of disenfranchised, disaffected unemployed beneath. One is the pessimism Jeremy Rifkin evidently feels (he offers the hope in The End Of Work that people will begin to find meaning to their lives through voluntary work, but it comes across thinly, as a bit of an afterthought).