Charles Handy

Charles Handy CBE is an Irish author and philosopher specialising in organisational behaviour and management. Among the ideas he has advanced are the ‘portfolio worker’ and the ‘Shamrock Organization’ (in which professional core workers, freelance workers and part-time/temporary routine workers each form one leaf of the Shamrock).

He was born the son of a Church of Ireland archdeacon in Clane, Co. Kildare, Ireland in 1932 and educated as a boarder at Bromsgrove School and Oriel College, Oxford.

Charles Handy’s business career started in marketing at Shell International. He left Shell and spent a year as an International Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On his return he joined the London Business School, where he was Professor from 1978–94.

He has appeared regularly in the Thinkers50, a biannual global ranking of the most influential living management thinkers. In 2001 he was second on this list, behind Peter Drucker; in 2005 he was tenth; 2007 he was fourteenth. When the Harvard Business Review had a special issue to mark their 50th Anniversary, they asked Charles Handy, Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg to write special articles.

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