80
REVIEWS
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
A design for a life less ordinary Charles Handy’s new book is a brilliant critique of corporate and professional inertia, warning that the choice for companies is to change fundamentally or decay rapidly, writes Ben Walker
The Second Curve Charles Handy Random House bit.ly/2ndcurve
There is a hill in Derbyshire, England, called Thorpe Cloud. It’s a pretty sort of place, next to the babbling River Dove, deep in the Dales. It’s hardly a king among mountains, rising to just 942 ft. But it’s shaped beautifully, like a child might draw a hill. You exert yourself for the climb, then ease your legs as you roll over the summit. It’s pretty easy walking coming down. If a second-curve thinker were climbing Thorpe Cloud, he might advocate paragliding away before he got to the easy part. There’s little point hiking beyond the peak, because, after that, the only way is down. If you accept the central premise of The Second Curve, that the lives of everything – jobs, organizations, even governments – are essentially shaped like Thorpe Cloud, you must also accept the premise that there are points when you have to abandon a good gig even if it would be easier, less stressful, and possibly more lucrative, to stay. The trick in life, says the book, is to avoid the descents. On the way down, life might require less exertion, but it is fundamentally less fulfilling. The author, management guru Charles Handy, thinks he must have made a terrible husband, because as soon as he got to grips with jobs – even whole careers – he leapt off the hill towards new adventures. Having met Handy, I can’t imagine that he ever quite fell into the ‘poor husband’ category. But there’s a poignant part of the book that suggests the normal lifetime of a marriage is only about 15 years, and that those marriages that do endure and thrive, like his own, are because the couple within them have found their own second curve. The Handys’ new phase came when Handy’s wife Elizabeth became his manager, breaking the rule about mixing work and pleasure, and flourishing as a result. I came away from the book thinking
Handy’s second-curve thesis is largely right, as challenging as his message might be. Certainly, his examples from the world of commerce ring true – companies cannot merrily stump along doing much the same forever and expecting to grow at the same rate until Kingdom Come. Everything has a lifespan. The choice for most companies is to change fundamentally, or rapidly decay. In his chapter on the dilemmas of economic growth, Handy tells a wonderful story of an exchange he shared years ago with an IBM executive. The IBM man showed him a graph of the company’s projected sales growth, set against the forecast GDP for the US. At one point on the graph, IBM’s projected global
As soon as he got to grips with jobs, even whole careers, he leapt off the hill to new adventures sales surpassed the GDP of the world’s richest nation. Handy told the IBM executive that his company’s projection – that it would one day be bigger than the economy in which it was born – was absurd. The man replied that at IBM’s then rate of growth, it was perfectly feasible. Handy concludes that eternal growth is a fantasy, even if it is a concept entertained by all too many senior executives. That said, Handy is no hippie. He rejects the hair-shirt idea, becoming popular in some circles, that somehow economic growth is bad for us. He asks what we would prefer instead, referencing the brutish ten centuries during which the economy barely grew, and pointing out that when economies fail to develop,
Dialogue Q2 2016
080-081_Dialogue_Q2_2016.indd 80
28/01/2016 12:29