The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  Maureen Duffy in her book Gor-Saga, a science fiction novel about genetic experimentation, sets the story in a Britain divided between the professional workers, all living in smart urban ghettoes with their own entry controls and pass-cards and working in campus-like offices and laboratories surrounded by high wire fences, and the rest, the ‘nons’ who, supported by the state, exist in a dreary monotone world of controls and regulations, with no-go areas in the cities and the countryside where guerilla groups hold sway.

  I thought it was all fiction until I drove down to dinner one night in the rhododendron belt in Surrey. On turning into the private estate where my hosts lived I found my way barred by a gate. I had to identify myself before I was allowed in. At dinner, later on, discussing possible futures the lady on my right said, ‘Of course, the world will inevitably be divided into alphas and gammas and you and I,’ she said, politely including me amongst the alphas, ‘must be prepared to pay for the gammas to have their fortnight each year on the Costa Brava.’ Perhaps, I reflected, driving home, the world of science fiction may not be so fictional after all.

  This divided society, this monotone world dedicated to efficiency, this world made for the professional class to dominate, will happen only if we allow the organization to dominate our lives, if all meaning, all status and all money, continue to stem from the ‘job’, if the 50,000 hours become the only hours that matter, if the first half of this book is the only half which really counts.

  Organizations, good organizations, effective organizations, are essential. Jobs, reduced perhaps to 50,000 hours or 25 years, are important to people and to society. The reshaped organization could, however, enslave us or free us. We shall miss a great opportunity if we do not look beyond the formal organization and beyond the 50,000 hours. Now, for the first time in the human experience, we have a chance to shape our work to suit the way we live instead of our lives to fit our work. We would be mad to miss the chance.

  A World That Might Be

  Shaping work to suit our lives means, first of all, taking more of the job outside the organization, so that the job is more in our control. That, as we have seen, is already happening. It is still unusual. It is more difficult for the organization to manage the contractual fringe, the independents. It is often a strange experience for the individual. Somehow we have grown used to the fact that organizations should have their own homes. People often like, it seems, to live in two places at once, the office and the family, even if it is not strictly necessary. One small business, exclusively concerned with telephone selling, still insists that the telephone sellers come in to the office to do their telephoning. They happily agree. It is, after all, what everyone does. The cost, however, of all that office space, of the time for coffee and for gossiping, of the inconvenience of the absentees, is making the bosses think again.

  The world of work was not always so separate. I grew up in rural Ireland where organizations with their own homes hardly existed other than the local bank and the mill. I hardly knew anyone, as I recall, who went out to work. They lived above the shop they owned, beside the school they taught in, on their farm, above their surgery, next door to their church if they were a priest, or in the same house as their office if a solicitor. Work and life were intertwined. There was one life, not two; one community for each, not two. They were their own men and their own women, not someone else’s role occupants. Villages then were places where people lived not just slept at night or relaxed on Sunday.

  There will be more like them again. By some estimates one quarter of the working population will be working from home by the end of the century. From home is different from at home. The home is the base not the prison. We can leave it. There will be organizational work clubs, work centres, meeting rooms and conference centres. We shall not be confined to our terminal in our little back room; there will be people to meet, places to go to, team projects and group assignments. I work from home myself. I go out from it nearly every day, but almost always to a different place. It is not a lonely life.

  By taking the job, physically, outside the organization we make it more our own. We have more control over when and how we do it. If we go one step farther and take it contractually outside the organization, becoming in some way self-employed, we make it even more our own. The organization has retreated. It is less dominant, more a helper now than an owner. Jobs do not necessarily belong in organizations any more. It is, when one thinks about it, a significant discontinuity, a change which makes a difference.

  It will happen because it will be more economical for the organization. It is therefore, in my view, inevitable. It is up to us to turn the inevitable into an opportunity by seizing the chance to shape our work to suit the way we want to live instead of always living to fit in with our work. It is not always easy. Suddenly we have choice and choice requires decisions. Do you get up now or linger one hour longer in bed? It is a lovely day; should you or should you not take the afternoon off? Do you or do you not labour late into the night to make that piece of work even better still, because there is no one to tell you that it is already good enough? Can one ever dare to take a holiday?

  With choice always comes responsibility. The individual gets more freedom but can choose to abuse that freedom by poor quality work, by cheating or by laziness. The organization gets more flexibility but can abuse that flexibility by exploiting the outsider, by tightening its conditions and reducing the rewards. If this world outside the organization is going to be a better world everyone must be conscious of their responsibility as well as of their choices. They may not. That is always the risk in the opportunity and why it is still only a world that might be.

  Taking more jobs outside the organization is one part of the opportunity. To take more of our life outside the organization is the other part. It is going to happen, whether we wish it to or not because we are, as I have demonstrated, in the process of splitting the lifetime job in half. Where our fathers thought it normal to spend 100,000 hours, or nearly 50 years, in their organization our children will spend only half of that, whether they cram it into 25 years or spread it out more thinly.

  We are taking away 50,000 hours of the job. What will happen in those hours? That is our challenge, and our opportunity. To spend them lying on the beach or sitting in front of endless television serials is one option. Few will take it, partly because they will not be able to afford it, mainly because they will not want it. Endless, mindless leisure has other names – unemployment or imprisonment. Leisure as recreation only makes sense when it is the other side of work, when it is re-creation for more work. Work I am sure, is what we will want to do, work re-discovered, work re-defined to mean more than selling your time to someone else, work that is more in tune with the rest of life, work that is more personal, more creative, more fun than most jobs can ever be.

  Those unused 50,000 hours can be our opportunity to discover the missing bits of ourselves, to explore new talents, to add variety to ordinary weeks, to meet new people and to learn new skills. Those unusual hours can add up to a huge new resource for society rather than a pile of unwanted people if we start thinking positively, if we find a way to pay for it all, and if, first of all, we start redefining ‘work’ so that it no longer means only a job. It is not the devil who finds work for idle hands to do, it is our own human instincts which make us want to contribute to our world, to be useful and to matter in some way to other people; to have a reason to get up in the morning.

  Put that way, work is the purpose of life, it also gives us a pattern or structure for our days and a chance to meet new people. Purpose, pattern and people, the three Ps at the heart of life. It is odd, then, and sad too, that work has had such a bad press in recent times so that people can even talk of a world without work as some sort of paradise.

  It happened, that bad press, because work came to mean only the ‘job’, and too many jobs were full of toil for others with little sense of mattering, and not much obvious purpose even if the organization, intricate
as it is, becomes our great opportunity to put work back into the heart of life. It needs a bit of upside-down thinking to re-invent work, to make it, perhaps, the best of the four-letter words.

  7 Portfolios

  The Work Portfolio

  TO RE-INVENT WORK in its fullest sense we need another word. ‘Portfolio’ might be that word. It is not, of course, a new word. There are artists’ portfolios, architects’ portfolios, share portfolios. A portfolio is a collection of different items, but a collection which has a theme to it. The whole is greater than the parts. A share portfolio has balance to it, mixing risk and security, income and long-term gain in proper proportions, an artist’s portfolio shows how one talent has more than one way of displaying itself.

  A work portfolio is a way of describing how the different bits of work in our life fit together to form a balanced whole. ‘Flat people’ as E.M. Forster called them, were those who had only one dimension to their lives. He preferred rounded people. I would now call them portfolio people, the sort of people who, when you ask them what they do, reply, ‘It will take a while to tell you it all, which bit would you like?’ Sooner or later, thanks to the re-shaping of the organization we shall all be portfolio people. It is good news.

  The categories of the portfolio

  There are five main categories of work for the portfolio: wage work and fee work, which are both forms of paid work; homework, gift work and study work, which are all free work.

  The definitions and the differences are obvious but important – the most important being the difference between paid work and free work. It is free work which has been the missing part of the portfolio in recent times.

  Wage (or salary) work represents money paid for time given. Fee work is money paid for results delivered. Employees do wage work; professionals, craftspeople and freelancers do fee work. Fee work is increasing as jobs move outside the organization. Even some insiders now get fees (bonuses) as well as wages.

  Homework includes that whole catalogue of tasks that go on in the home, from cooking and cleaning, to children and caring, from carpentry to shopping. Done willingly or grudgingly, it is all work.

  Gift work is work done for free outside the home, for charities and local groups, for neighbours or for the community.

  Study work done seriously and not frivolously is, to me, a form of work not recreation. Training for a sport or a skill is study work, so is the learning of a new language or a new culture, so are the long days I spend reading other peoples’ books in preparation for writing my own.

  In the past, for most of us, our work portfolio has had only one item in it, at least for men. It was their job or, more grandiosely, their career. This was, when you think about it, a risky strategy. Few would these days put all their money into one asset, yet that is what a lot of us have been doing with our lives. That one asset, that one job, has had to work overtime for we have looked to it for so many things at once – for interest or satisfaction in the work itself, for interesting people and good company, for security and money, for the chance of development and reality. The list of things which people say that they want from their jobs has been consistent over the years; the problem has always been that we looked for the whole list from one job – no wonder, in retrospect, that so many have been disappointed.

  For some, for those in the core of the shamrock, things will not change noticeably. Indeed, because work in the core will be more pressured, more consuming and more involving, the job will fill the whole portfolio to bursting point with just one item. There will be room for nothing more, even at times for family and fun as long as they remain in that core.

  The message of the 50,000 hours, however, is clear. These busy busy jobs in the core will not last for ever or for as long as they used to, or even for as long as their occupants would like them to. It will be called age discrimination, no doubt, but we shall come to realize that high energy jobs in the knowledge-based organizations of the future do require younger people. Swimmers fade in their late teens, tennis players in their late twenties, chess-players in their thirties, journalists in their forties, and who knows what happens to money-dealers after thirty? We shall become used to the idea that the full-time executive or skilled worker fades in his or her late forties, in most occupations, and, if you believe any of the earlier chapters, everyone in the role will be either an executive or a skilled worker.

  There will be glorious exceptions, and there will be some who will fade into different glories, becoming coaches or mentors or managers to the newer stars, swapping energy for wisdom. But wisdom is a part-time role. As his partner said to my friend, ‘We value your wisdom greatly, John, and would love to have you around, but only on Tuesdays.’ Nor is it always the best tennis players who become the best coaches. It is happening already today in those organizations whose only assets are their talented people – in advertising, in consultancy, in design – the energy roles are increasingly going to people in their thirties and forties, with the wisdom roles ‘confined to Tuesdays’.

  For the core people, the full portfolio of work only begins to expand after the job ends. The most difficult transition for them is in fact from a one-item portfolio to a multi-item one, not to an empty one. The transition is always a very personal bit of discontinuous change and one to which people could with advantage apply a bit of upside-down thinking. Alas, however, too many of the core seek to perpetuate the only concept of work which they have known, the full-time job in an organization, wage work at its best.

  William came to see me one day. He was 48 and a senior account director and board member of a big advertising agency. The Chairman had just told him that they felt he should ‘move on’, leave them at the end of the year, along with one year’s extra salary, the gift of his car and so on. It was a generous leaving present.

  ‘I need another job,’ said William. ‘Have you any ideas?’

  ‘What are you good at?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know, really. Running an account group in advertising, I suppose.’

  ‘Why don’t you try this,’ I said. ‘Ask twenty people who know you well, at work or outside work, to tell you just one thing which they think you do well. That’s all. Not a critique of your personality just one thing you do well, in their experience of you.’

  ‘O.K. I’ll try it,’ he said.

  He found it difficult. He was a reticent Englishman, after all. But he came back in a fortnight looking puzzled but happy. ‘I’ve got a list of twenty things,’ he said. ‘Quite surprising, some of them. Funny thing, though,’ he added, ‘none of them mentioned running an account group.’ ‘Maybe that’s why it’s time to move on!’ I said. He didn’t smile. We looked at his list in some detail. We discussed lots of ways, little ways, in which he could put his talents to use. There were ideas there for little business ventures, for voluntary activities, for some teaching, for personal learning, for some writing. None of them, however, added up on their own to a full-time proper job. He still did not smile.

  He went back to advertising in the end, not as an account director, but as director in charge of administration in another and smaller agency. It was a proper job, but in a couple of years’ time he will be around again, I suspect. Perhaps by then he will be able to accept that one full-time job in advertising is not the only nor even the best way to deploy his many and considerable talents. We are all, however, the children of our times, or, more accurately, the children of yesterday’s times. Discontinuity in careers was not part of those times, nor were portfolios of different sorts of work.

  For those now in the core, however, such discontinuity looks increasingly likely in their mid-fifties. For their children it will more likely be in their early fifties if not before. Nor are there going to be many alternative core jobs available. Like it or not, the ex-core employee will be forced into a portfolio life, and life without some work, as any of the long-term unemployed will confirm, is life without meaning. Portfolios stuffed only with memories soon gather dust.

/>   Already the fashion is changing. ‘Early retirement’ used to be words spoken in a hush. The end of the job meant the end of life to many. Now you will hear many a person boast of how they have ‘managed to arrange early retirement’. It has become a technical term signifying release or a key to new possibilities. Ask those people what they will do next and they do not talk of wage work but of ways of keeping their hand in (some small free work), of time for old enthusiasms, or new causes and hobbies (gift work), of helping out more with household chores or parenting (homework) or of taking up a new interest (study work). They don’t call it work, but they should. They are building up a new portfolio and in so doing re-defining their lives and themselves. Early retirement is not the right word for them.

  For others, the portfolios will have a different balance. It is not everybody’s wish to work 45 hours a week or even more for someone else – although a Government minister spoke recently of her 100 hour-a-week job – and, statistically, half of all those in paid work won’t be able to anyway. For them the portfolio will be more varied. Sometimes there will be two or more part-time jobs (nearly 1 million Britons officially declare two jobs), sometimes they will save money rather than make money by increasing their self-sufficiency at home. Homework can often be a form of self-paid fee work. For many, small bits of proper fee work, or part-time self-employment, becomes an integral part of their way of life. They think of it as ‘extra’, money for the kids’ presents, or for holidays – pocket-money. The authorities call it moonlighting and illegal. It is both, of course; understandable and illegal.

  For many women, paid work has to give way to free work when they start to raise a family. As any woman will tell you a family is work, however much you love them. Understandably, many women want proper recognition for it, money to put it bluntly, but that is to play along with the conceit that only paid work counts. As more men re-balance their portfolios it should be increasingly possible for more women to put serious bits of paid work into their portfolios. Indeed, as I have argued earlier, organizations will increasingly need them and their skills, while the new technology and the new kinds of organizations will make it all much easier for them to fit bits of fee work into their lives.