A Tribute To Charles Handy

This is a tribute to a dear friend of The Nowhere Office, Charles Handy, the management writer, who died this week aged 92.

Julia Hobsbawm and Stefan Stern are joined by the FT’s Andrew Hill to discuss Handy's life and legacy, his extremely sharp predictions about work, the humanism at the heart of his thinking, and his unconventional practices like ‘empty chair’ exercises. We have included an interview with Charles Handy from the very first episode of The Nowhere Office.

In this episode's My Working Life segment, Indrani Sen, Features Editor at Fortune Magazine, tells us about journalism on 9/11 in New York, the sheer fun of her job, anxiety in legacy media, and a possible career shift. This sponsored feature is brought to you in association with Whitefox—exceptional publishers for exceptional stories. Learn more at wearewhitefox.com.

The Nowhere Office is a Fully Connected Production in partnership with Sandstone Global Productions. Music by Julian Brezon. Discover more at workathon.io.

Books mentioned in the episode:

By Charles Handy:

• The Gods of Management: The Changing Work of Organizations (OUP, 1979)

• The Age of Unreason: New Thinking for a New World (Random House Business, 1989)

• The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future (Random House Business, 1995)

• The Elephant and the Flea: New Thinking for a New World (Random House Business, 2002)

• The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society (Random House Business, 2015). 

Also mentioned: 

• Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (Profile Books, 2024). 

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