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Purpose and benefits

Now approaching 70, Irish-born Charles Handy remains the genteel, civilised voice of management. A British oil executive turned academic, he is now in a glorious third career as a populist social philosopher. Handy worked for Shell before pursuing an academic career as a professor at the London Business School. His first book, "Understanding Organizations" (1976), gave little hint of the wide-ranging, social and philosophical nature of what was to come. In his later books "The Age of Unreason" (1989) and "The Empty Raincoat" (1994), Handy coined some of the best known and most useful management concepts of recent years, including ‘the shamrock organisation’ and ‘the portfolio career’, and explored federalism in an engagingly accessible way.