Tag Archives: Charles Handy

Communism is dead. Long live (corporate) Communism!

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in business, capitalism, future, human capital, knowledge, management, philosophy, society

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Communism

The sensible consensus is that communism became all but extinct with the end of the Cold War. I say it may be so, but the mindset that fueled it continues to live unhindered. Your next thought may be that I am referring to North Korea. But I have something much closer to home in mind: the U.S. corporate sector. Yes, you didn’t misread. I will dare to say that the mindset of the corporate sector in 2014 is eerily reminiscent of communist thinking.

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Organizational Transformation and Development

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in human capital, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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One of the lasting memories I have from the Peter Drucker Global Forum event held in Vienna, Austria in November 2013 is of the great Charles Handy. His speech was great. But what amused me more was his playfulness. His willingness to still take chances. I caught him staring intently for what must have been a minute at an 100 year old “hop-on-hop-off” wooden elevator with no doors that still functions in the building of the Federation of Austrian Industries building in Vienna (see picture below). Eventually he hopped onto the moving elevator and everything turned out fine to my relief.

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Your boss, the middleman – Part II

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development, problem solving

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I ended my initial post on this topic with a pointer to the so-called “freelance economy”. In this post I want to take this thread further, as I think it can shed light into the future of employment.

What I was implying at the end of my initial post is that reducing or even doing away with “middleman” corporate hierarchies in a post-materialistic, fluid economy of ideas doesn’t lead to anarchy. Rather it logically leads to a “freelance economy”, a world where, in British management philosopher Charles Handy’s words, free-floating freelancer “fleas” service multiple corporate “elephants” following the need for their specific talents.

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The rising toll of the (still) predominant mechanistic mindset in a complex world

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in complexity, Crisis, democracy, future, society

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Mechanistic_Thinking_EA

Thesis: there is I believe a meta-societal, global shift from robustness to resilience (see this for an intuitive illustration of the difference). This is fueled by an underlying transition from a mechanistic (Industrial Revolution) to a complex-adaptive (Conceptual Economy) worldview.  We have managed to design robust systems (economy, air traffic, healthcare, energy), but not resilient. Robust systems are great for quasi-stable environments, but the price for not having resilience in highly dynamic, networked environments is staggering: $12 trillion for the 2008 financial crisis, and counting. Unless we learn how to design resilient systems, likely through the application of complexity principles, democracy itself may be at risk.

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