The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society

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Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management — including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management — have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends — such as Beyond Certainty — has changed the way we view society.
In The Second Curve, Handy builds on a life’s work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities lie ahead. He looks at current trends in capitalism and asks whether it is a sustainable system. He explores the dangers of a society built on credit. He challenges the myth that remorseless growth is essential. He even asks whether we should rethink our roles in life — as students, parents, workers and voters — and what the aims of an ideal society of the future should be.
Provocative and thoughtful as ever, he sets out the questions we all need to ask ourselves — and points us in the direction of some of the answers.

About the author

Charles Handy
Charles Handy
Charles Brian Handy CBE is an Irish author/philosopher specialising in organisational behaviour and management. Among the ideas he has advanced are the "portfolio career" and…
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The Second Curve reads less like the self-indulgent reflections of a comfortably-off octogenarian than the bracing manifesto of a forward-looking radical. For instance, Handy gently but forcefully airs the following ideas. The “giants of business and finance” should be dismantled into their component parts. Companies should be remade as “citizen organizations”, like universities. Corporate pay should be governed by a set ratio between the highest and lowest paid.

Britain’s adversarial House of Commons — with government and opposition benches facing each other — should be replaced with a horseshoe-shaped chamber. Handy has long suggested that people should jump to the “second curve” of their careers, however scary the prospect, before the first one turns downward. He began his own second curve just before his 50th birthday when he leaped into a role as a freelance management “guru” (a term he claims to dislike even though it adorns his promotional material).

He has since forecast how business and society will develop, using a series of striking metaphors. The book, then, is a useful primer of Handy’s ideas for anyone who is unfamiliar with his work. But it is far more than that. Here, Handy extends the second curve idea from individuals to society, capitalism, and government, all of which he believes require a rethink before it is too late. Many of the institutional breakwaters behind which Handy and subsequent generations could shelter — schools and universities, companies, friendships, marriages, and pensions — are under threat, he writes.

While there will always be organizations of some sort, predicting what they will look like a few years from now is hard. Old authorities have lost their power. “When there is no one to tell you what to do, the why and how of our lives is more than ever up for grabs,” he writes. But the book is as much about the opportunities of what Handy calls “the DIY society” as it is about the risks. If people teach themselves the art of “self-responsibility” — how to take care of their own education, health, and finances, for instance — they will flourish.

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