Charles Handy Quotes
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We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.
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A leader shapes and shares a vision, which gives point to the work of others.
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Passion is born of vague hopes.
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Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child
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Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.
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To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
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We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.
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The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world-not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
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We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
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It is tempting to call for better leadership, but we probably expect too much from the leaders of the nations. Those nations are too big, the connections not strong enough, the commitment to the future not long enough. It is better to look smaller, to our now-smaller organisations, to local communities and cities, to families and clusters of friends, to small networks of portfolio people with time to give to something bigger than themselves. We have to fashion our own directions in our own places.
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A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison.
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The world by and large has to be reinvented.
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There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
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Creativity is born of chaos, even if it is somewhat difficult to glimpse the possibilities in the midst of the confusion.
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The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.
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The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
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Learning is experience understood in tranquility.
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Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.
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Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.
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Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training
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Profit has to be a means to other ends rather than an end in itself.
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The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.
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Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists.
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You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.
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If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.
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Talent comes with an individual name tag.
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The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.
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Forget land, buildings, or machines-the real source of wealth today is intelligence, applied intelligence. We talk glibly of "intellectual property" without taking on board what it really means. It isn't just patent rights and brand names; it is the brains of the place.
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We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational processes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage.
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If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.
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