The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World

by Charles Handy

  Without commitment to anyone or anything else, however, there is no sense of responsibility for others, and without responsibility there is no need for morality – anything goes, or at least anything that is legal, if it’s what you want. To be a citizen seems to mean nothing much more than being a customer, letting others make decisions which you can then take or leave, or take and then complain about. ‘I pay my taxes, don’t I?’ was the response of one Chairman when asked what responsibility he felt for the thousands whom he had just declared redundant. Taxes, in fact, are now seen as the way we discharge our responsibilities to the rest of the community, and, understandably, we wish to pay as few of those as possible and to leave it to others to decide how to spend them while we get on with our own lives.

  It may all be a rational response to a chaotic world, one where the future is there to be invented, not predicted, and certainly not to be controlled; but it makes for a lonely world, one in which the neighbourhood is a jungle, the stranger a beast to hide from and our home a privatized prison. Bauman quotes Max Frisch: ‘We can now do what we want, and the only question is what do we want? At the end of our progress we stand where Adam and Eve once stood; and all we are faced with now is the moral question.’

  There lies the rub. I take a more positive view of what William Rees-Mogg has called individual sovereignty. As I see it, we have been put back in charge of our lives. We can do with them what we like. Given that know-how or know-what, plus energy and initiative, are the new sources of wealth, anyone can in theory earn their living. The question then is ‘what sort of living does one want?’ The words ‘in theory’ are, of course, important. There are huge structural impediments to individual wealth creation. Many don’t have the know-how, or the initiative or the will. Somehow they must be helped to acquire these things, if the idea of personal sovereignty is not going to seem like some sort of obscene joke perpetrated on a permanent underclass.

  That is our most urgent priority in the new century. But it won’t be tackled unless we deal with the more fundamental question of ‘what do we want’ both for ourselves and, by extension, for others, because Immanuel Kant was right; you can’t, in all equity, propose one set of rules for yourself, and something else for everyone else. Without some commonly accepted agreement on the purpose of life, and on the proper balance between what we can expect and what is expected from us, society becomes a battleground, where the devil takes the hindmost. Max Frisch spoke the truth; it is a moral question.

  As things stand we seem to be saying that life is essentially about economics, that money is the measure of most things, and that the market is its sorting mechanism. My hunch is that most of us don’t believe any of this, and that it won’t work, for reasons given earlier, but we are trapped in our own rhetoric and have, as yet, nothing else to offer, not even a different way to talk about it. There is, I believe, a hunger for something else which might be more enduring and more worthwhile.

  CORPORATE SOVEREIGNTY

  The same sorts of argument apply to corporations. The rhetoric says that businesses are accountable to their owners and are their property and their instruments. The English law, however, has always regarded companies as individuals, who can be sued and held responsible, not as inanimate pieces of property, whose owners are the ones to be held responsible. I think that the law has it right. A company is a person. The concept of ownership is, I suggest, deeply flawed in this new era. For one thing, what is it that the owners own? The value of most businesses these days lies in their invisible assets, their accumulated skills and experience, their brands, research and managerial ability. It is hard to see how anyone can ‘own’ such things, which are largely tied up with particular human beings, each of whom is free to walk away at any time.

  Secondly, most of the owners of any public corporation have, in fact, put no money into the business. The stock market is a secondary market in which shares change hands without any of the money going anywhere near the business. ‘Shareholders’ is an accurate description of the notional owners, but they should, more truthfully, be regarded as investors rather than owners. As investors, they need to be kept happy, not least to keep the share price high, although I would argue that the Anglo-American tradition of high dividends prices happiness too high. Large dividends paid out to shareholders can bleed the company of the money it needs for the future, since there are few opportunities for happy investors to put their dividends back into the same business, as true owners might want to. Some organizations are now using their profits to buy back their own shares, leading some commentators to wonder what happens when a corporation owns 100% of its stock, and is then legally responsible only to itself.

  For all practical purposes, however, organizations are already responsible only to themselves. As long as they keep their investors happy, businesses are, by and large, free to do what they like. If you, as an investor, don’t like what they do, you can always leave. If your investment is so large that you can’t conveniently leave, you can, in the last resort, get rid of the top people and put in some replacements who will, you hope, do something better. That is not necessarily an act of ownership, but the last resort of worried investors.

  In practical terms, therefore, businesses are responsible only to themselves, for what they do and how they do it. In the real world, a well-managed business pays very close attention to its various constituencies, or stakeholders, because it wants to keep not only its investors happy, but, even more so, its customers, its workforce and its suppliers, and, necessarily, the surrounding community, because it is hard to grow any business in a desert or a slum. Keeping all these constituencies happy does not necessarily mean that it is accountable to them for anything else. Provided they all profit in some way from it, the business can decide for itself what it stands for and what its goals are. Well-run businesses make a lot of money because they do the right things right, but it doesn’t stop there. The real question is, what is the money, the profit, going to be used for, and in what manner will it be used? For that we have to trust the people who manage the business, the new professionals.

  This is the age of the professionals, in business as in everything else. Strangely, there are few true capitalists now, in this the flowering of the capitalist age, only the agents of the savers – agents who are professionals themselves: the pension funds, insurance groups and mutual funds, investing on the behalf of the ordinary person. They do not consider themselves to be owners, only investors. Our wealth, therefore, is increasingly in the hands of those professionals who either manage or work with the corporations. They are supposedly in charge of the sovereign corporations and it is in them increasingly that we have to place our trust.

  This is particularly true of the transnational corporations, who are more accurately called supranationals, because they float above rather than across the nation states, owing allegiance to none – or, as they would see it, to every separate state in which they operate. These giant corporations are, in theory, accountable to their shareholders, but the latter, I have argued, are interested only in their dividend stream and not otherwise in how the corporations create their wealth, in faraway places of which they often know nothing.

  At the last count, 70 of these giants had revenues bigger than the GNP of Cuba. Like Cuba, they are effectively centrally planned economies, with no serious hints of democracy. Cargill – a family-owned US corporation – has a greater sales turnover in coffee alone than the GNP of any of the African countries from which it buys its coffee beans. Cargill also accounts for over 60% of the world trade in cereals. In most countries such a market share would automatically trigger a monopoly inquiry, but Cargill effectively belongs to no country. It is accountable only to itself. I have no reason to believe that Cargill exploits its position. The point is that whether it does or not entirely depends on the values and priorities of the family who own it.

  These semi-states are powerful forces in the world, for good or ill. They transfer technology and know-how across bord
ers. They move money faster and in greater quantity than any democratic government can. They can make and unmake alliances, take decisions and start things happening with an ease and a speed that any ordinary state must envy. And they can do almost all of this without consulting anybody beyond those directly concerned. Unlike other states, they are not part of the United Nations, or subject to its resolutions. They are answerable to no one save their own investors.

  One day, the nation states may try to have some say in the governance of these free-roving alternative states. Until then, we really have to rely on the companies’ own sense of their proper purpose, which starts with the essential need to be profitable but must then answer the ‘what for?’ question. The late David Packard, co-founder and inspiration of Hewlett Packard, one of the world’s most respected international businesses, put it this way, shortly before he died:

  Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company’s existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company, so that they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately – they make a contribution to society, a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental.

  Great companies aren’t shy about saying, publicly, why they exist. James Collins and Jerry Porras collected a few examples in their research on successful long-lasting companies:

  Mary Kay Cosmetics: To give unlimited opportunity to women.

  Merck: To preserve and improve human life.

  Sony: To experience the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of the public.

  Wal-Mart: To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

  Walt Disney: To make people happy.

  Assuming that they mean what they say, you can understand why people might want to work for these companies, even if it is only for six years. Such companies have a personality and what some have called a soul. You can almost smell it, when it is there. I once asked my students to walk into an office or a plant and, without speaking to anyone, to make a guess at what kind of environment it would be to work in, and what kind of attitudes and values the management would hold. They were amazed at how accurate their guesses turned out to be when we later visited the same places more formally and conducted surveys of the staff.

  I maintain that companies are no different from individuals, or vice versa. Both are responsible for their own destinies, and for their own behaviour. Both need to work out their underlying purpose, which is what gives them their uniqueness. They cannot pass that buck, and there are relatively few constraints on what they choose to do, provided that it is within the law. That is both the opportunity and the risk. For some, however, the thought that we are in charge of our own destiny is either bad science or bad religion. If they are right, then this book is subversive. What we believe about these things matters hugely.

  THE GERANIUM THEORY

  I was sitting on a terrace in Italy talking these matters over with a friend. ‘I don’t see why you bother about these philosophical pedantries,’ he said. ‘That geranium over there doesn’t, and it seems to be thriving.’

  ‘But I’m not a geranium,’ I replied indignantly.

  ‘What makes you think you are any different? You may look different, and have more faculties, and live longer, but, basically, that’s all we are, sophisticated geraniums. So lie back and enjoy it. Do what your instincts tell you. May I fill your glass?’

  ‘But if you were a geranium, wouldn’t you want to be a better geranium?’ I asked.

  ‘Only if my strain of geranium was a self-improving sort, in which case I would still be following my geranium instincts, but it wouldn’t make me a morally better geranium, just, maybe, the sort of geranium that people would want to propagate.’

  I realized that I was heading into the territory of Edward Wilson, the sociobiologist, and of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins writes seductively about the selfish gene in books like The Blind Watchmaker and River Out of Eden, arguing in a neo-Darwinian fashion that we are, in every way, the product of our inherited genes, that even our religious impulses, if we have any, are inherited tendencies. It was an argument that I could not win, because, whatever I said, my friend would come back and say, ‘But, of course, you are that sort of geranium and so you are programmed that way.’

  It’s a tempting idea, this sort of genetic determinism, because it suggests that feelings of responsibility for anything are merely inherited characteristics. The Society for Neuroscience, an academic discipline which deals with some of these issues, is one of the fastest growing areas of study in the United States. Formed in 1970 with 1,100 members, it now has 26,000. Neuroscientists have been heard to say that, given powerful enough computers, it should eventually be possible to predict the course of any human’s life moment by moment, including that person’s reaction to this news.

  The sudden switch from Nurture, in the form of social conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, may yet turn out to be one of the major intellectual events of this end of the century. To listen to the new Nature enthusiasts, it matters not how you were brought up, or what school you went to. Forget Freud. Your type of geranium was all predetermined as soon as you were conceived. Social policy is mere wishful thinking, bound to be unavailing against the forces of Nature. If, therefore, you don’t happen to have any of those feelings of responsibility that are so important to others, don’t worry. Relax, just be what you feel you are. You have no other choice.

  That’s why determinism is dangerous. Even if it is true, we can’t afford to believe it. It can be interpreted, probably misinterpreted, as a licence for the crudest form of selfishness, a recipe for an amoral society at best, and an immoral one at worst.

  Businesses sometimes relish this sort of thinking. They like to see themselves as economic entities in the grip of forces greater than themselves. They are what they have to be in order to survive in the Darwinian world of economics. Such a philosophy allows them to exploit their customers or their suppliers or even their employees as long as they can get away with it. Geraniums have short but often sunny lives. So it is with many get-rich-quick businesses who think that the idea of a contribution to society is just a lot of woolly wish-wash, about as relevant, to them, as grace before meals.

  Others would put the argument more positively. If you pursue the bottom line, subjecting yourself to the law of the marketplace, everything else – the way you treat employees, suppliers and, most importantly, customers – will fall into place. We are the pawns of the marketplace, driven by its imperatives. We need have no will of our own other than to succeed on its terms. The market will keep us honest.

  This whole issue is critically important. There is no point in worrying about what we want out of life and for life, if we really have no choice. Responsibility, then, to oneself or anyone else, is a non-concept and the whole of this book is a waste of paper. Stop reading at once if that is your view. There can be no absolute proof of either philosophy. It is what we ourselves choose to believe that influences our lives. Beliefs surface when the facts run out, or when the facts are not yet proven.

  The truth probably is that our genes give us certain predispositions – to be athletic, or mathematical, or linguistically skilled, or none of these, like me – on top of which we pile the impact of our early environment. Each of us reaches adulthood with a different starter package. But that isn’t the end of the story, only the beginning. What we do with it is still up to us. You don’t have to put your faith in a creator God who makes us different from the animals. You can believe, as I do, that humans are more than animated geraniums, that we have evolved into beings with a capacity for self-awareness which allows us to influence our own behaviour if we so
decide. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more dogmatic: ‘. . . There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement.’

  It is this self-awareness that enables us to work out a distinction between right and wrong, without any necessity to believe that the same sense of right and wrong was inborn in all of us. It is this self-awareness that allows us to develop the idea of progress, an idea which scientists agree is not naturally there in the process of evolution. It is this self-awareness, finally, that carries with it a concept of responsibility that goes beyond any genetic disposition to protect one’s own. For if biology is as genetically competitive and relentlessly opportunistic as we have been led to believe, and if there is no sense of progress in that process, no sense of purpose, if it’s all just a biological free-for-all, then purpose is something which we humans can and must impose on science.

  However, the reason that I reject the idea of a dominant determinism is that I would find life totally meaningless unless I believed that I had the capacity to influence it. Whether that feeling is genetically produced in me, or whether it comes about from my self-awareness working overtime, is irrelevant. Even Richard Dawkins says that he drew attention to the selfish gene not to justify it, but to encourage us ‘to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. I believe that I can make a dent in the world around me, for good or ill, and that is what, in the end, makes life interesting. My hope is that most people feel the same, deep down.

  THE RELIGIOUS OPTION

  Many people would regard my aspirations as arrogant humanism. We are, they argue, the instruments of God’s purpose, or, in a more atheistic and communist language, the agents of society. We should put our trust in Him, or maybe Her, and be guided by the teaching and tradition of the particular religion to which we adhere. It is not up to us to decide how or when to try to improve on God’s creation. I have known several devout men and women who genuinely feel that they are led by God to do what they do, and what they do is obviously of great help and comfort to others. I have little doubt that they are in touch with some inner voice or drive which conditions their behaviour. It would not be going too far to describe them as holy or saintly.