Charles Handy, who died just before Christmas, gifted us a wonderful legacy of wisdom, experience and forward thinking. His prediction (and exemplar) of Portfolio Life inspired me, and countless others, to give it a try. I was lucky enough to meet him and feel that inspiration directly.

The diary said it was always going to be a busy day with a tight schedule….. like many portfolio days!

But this was a special Portfolio day.

I was going to meet the far-sighted man who first defined ‘portfolio life’; the man whose books had inspired me to take that career leap. ‘Being Fifty in the Eighties’ ‘The Age of Unreason’, ‘The Empty Raincoat’ all spoke of his inspiring vision. He’d predicted the portfolio life and I was just starting it in 2000. I’d set out to meet each of the authors who’d helped me Max Comfort with ‘Portfolio People’, Nick Williams with ‘The Work we were born to do’, and now Charles Handy.

And now I was hoping to be another author on the subject! With two other portfolioers, I was planning a ‘how to’ book for fellow travellers. Charles Handy and his wife Liz had very kindly invited us to their Putney house for breakfast to discuss it.

 Getting up at 6:15 I drove in nervous anticipation to Putney to get there precisely at 8:00 and meet with Colin and Chris before we went in.

Charles was then about the age I am now (mid seventies) and was a lot sharper and more engaged than I might be today! We had a lively discussion on the practical issues of portfolio careers, families, writing and business. We turned the conversation to our book .  Would he write a foreward ?  Would he make an endorsement ?  He nodded. Liz his formidable, redoubtable wife came into the room with more coffee. She shook her head. ‘He doesn’t do endorsements’.  No further discussion!

But he had given us a very encouraging sentence : ‘You’re writing a ‘how to’ book about how to live the portfolio life. I get lots of people asking me where they can get that’

We used that in our introduction (with their permission!)

As we left, there were books by the door for us to buy and have signed.  Not just his own, but hers too, on photography. They explained how they split their life into six month periods at different locations, and each took a turn at putting their career first or supporting.

They also stressed that we were not to name him a ‘guru’. An author and social philosopher, yes, guru no. 

How can one define a thinker and speaker of his scope and wisdom?

His obituaries quote his pioneering ideas like the shamrock model , the sigmoid curve, Davy’s Bar,  and his insights into the big human issues of business and society, with the emphasis on human.

He set up an executive study program at LBS on the human element of business.  ‘Big corporations are prisons of the soul’….the ideal philosophy of a company :  ‘Doing your best at what you are best at for the benefit of others’

He saw the organisation of the future as decentralised, flexible, built on trust; like a village where everyone knows each other and what they do. And, with prescient vision, he could see the impact on the individual of the gig economy , remote working, fragmentation of a traditional career.

Unlike many commentators, he did not observe and theorise, he lived his life as a best example of the changes he saw ‘do as I say AND do as I do!’. It was a privilege to have our book recognised as a practical guide but such a practical thinker!

His memory of leaving Shell when he realised they had planned his whole life ahead, stayed with me and acted as a strong antidote to the ‘golden handcuffs’!

His later life was marked with sadness from the car accident when Liz died while he was driving.  He had a stroke afterwards.  But still he wrote. His final book, suitably titled The View from Ninety: Reflections on Living a Long, Contented Life, is due for publication in 2025. And I have just bought ’21 Letters on Life and its Challenges’, published in 2019, and dedicated to the grandchildren he wrote them for. At nearly 90, he still inspires with experience, realism and an acceptance of life

This quote from the Guardian obituary is also drawn from his late eighties

Few of those present will forget his closing speech, or the spontaneous standing ovation it prompted, at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna in 2018, when he called for a Lutheran Reformation of management, urging the audience not to wait for a great leader but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses … If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

I wish I had been there.  At whatever age, we can light the small fires, using our experience, and hope the sparks might find some youthful wind to illuminate where it might be helpful.