Charles Handy

Liz Handy just sent us a copy of a booklet for which she did the photography. It's a project she put together with a carers' group in part of the UK. Liz has a technique developed from David Hockney's montages (he did a huge Grand Canyon by sticking together Polaroids, you may remember). Liz's approach is to take photographs of people that represent different aspects of themselves, then put them into the same picture; so you will have three different versions of someone in different poses in the picture, representing the different facets of their life.

Charles Handy has been described as one of the world's leading writers on management and leadership. Where other gurus offer glib answers, Handy has always specialised in helping us question what our organizations are for; how best to structure them; how work fits into life and what our driving purpose is.

Handy is the author of The Empty Raincoat, The Elephant and The Flea, The Age of Paradox, 21 Ideas For Managers, and other books that help us stop, think and analyze exactly what it is we are doing at work and what we are for. 

Reward and recognition programmes can cheapen motivation and backfire unless they are carefully tailored to what actually makes your employees tick. Academic and business author Charles Handy tells a story to make the point.