Charles Handy famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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.
-- Charles Handy

#Inspirational #Mistake #Book
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Strength #Struggle #Successful
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Inspiring #Fire #Light
Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child
-- Charles Handy

#Children #Learning #Knowledge
Profit has to be a means to other ends rather than an end in itself.
-- Charles Handy

#Business #Mean #Finance
I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.
-- Charles Handy

#Change #Water #Behaviour
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Suicide #Giving #Risk
There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
-- Charles Handy

#Government #Example #States
The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be.
-- Charles Handy

#Challenges #Inspire #Want
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.
-- Charles Handy

#People #Giving #Work Out
Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.
-- Charles Handy

#Life #Differences #Making A Difference
Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.
-- Charles Handy

#Business #Creativity #Needs
Why don't we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to them, 'You are unique... you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel'.
-- Charles Handy

#Relationship #Children #School
In a knowledge economy, a good business is a community with a purpose, not a piece of property.
-- Charles Handy

#Community #Purpose #Pieces
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Inspirational #Fashion #Strong
Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning.
-- Charles Handy

#Change #Growth #Synonym
The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.
-- Charles Handy

#Real #Learning #People
Competition is healthy ... but there is more to life than winning or we should nearly all be losers
-- Charles Handy

#Winning #Competition #Healthy
Presidents, leaders, to be effective have to represent the whole to the parts and to the world outside. They may live in the centre but they must not be the centre. To reinforce the common sense they must be a constant teacher, ever travelling, ever talking, ever listening, the chief missionary of the common cause.
-- Charles Handy

#Leadership #Teacher #Talking
Learning is experience understood in tranquility.
-- Charles Handy

#Learning #Tranquility #Understood
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Strong #Business #Men
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Islands #Work Out #Trying
Talent comes with an individual name tag.
-- Charles Handy

#Teaching #Learning #Names
A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison.
-- Charles Handy

#Team #Successful #Supportive
I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
-- Charles Handy

#Success #Believe #Insecurity
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.
-- Charles Handy

#Educational #Learning #People
Purpose, pattern, and people, the three P's at the heart of life.
-- Charles Handy

#Heart #People #Fortune Cookie
A leader shapes and shares a vision, which gives point to the work of others.
-- Charles Handy

#Giving #Leader #Vision

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