Charles Handy Quotes

Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning.

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.

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.

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.

You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.

A leader shapes and shares a vision, which gives point to the work of others.

The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be.

The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are- bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.

The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison.

Life can only be understood backwards but you have to live it forward. You can only do that by stepping into uncertainty and by trying, within this uncertainty, to create your own islands of security....The new security will be a belief that ...if this doesn't work out you could do something else. You are your own security.

In a knowledge economy, a good business is a community with a purpose, not a piece of property.

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.

Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.

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.

We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.

If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.

Learning is experience understood in tranquility.

Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.

A consultant solves other people"s problems. I could never do that. I want to help other people solve their own problems.

Purpose, pattern, and people, the three P's at the heart of life.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

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.

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.

Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child