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C Handy

Publications and source records attributed to C Handy.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

On the uniqueness of the surface sources of evoked potentials.

The uniqueness of a surface density of sources localized inside a spatial region R and producing a given electric potential distribution in its boundary B0 is revisited. The situation in which R is filled with various subregions, each one having a definite constant value for the electric conductivity is considered. It is argued that the knowledge of the potential in all B0 fully determines the surface-located sources for a general class of surfaces supporting them and also a wide type of those sources. The class of surfaces can be defined as a union of an arbitrary but finite number of open or closed surfaces. The only restriction upon them is that no one of the closed surfaces contains inside it another (nesting) of the closed or open ones. The types of sources are surface charge densities and double layer (dipolar) densities for the open surfaces and more restrictively, only surface charge densities for the closed ones. A two-dimensional analytically solvable example illustrating the drastic appearance of uniqueness after arbitrarily small holes are opened in nested surfaces is discussed.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2001

Tocqueville revisited. The meaning of American prosperity.

Why is business so admired in the United States and so often denigrated in Europe? How has America created 30 million new jobs in the last 20 years while the European Union, with a bigger population, only managed 5 million? What is feeding America's apparently inexhaustible appetite for growth and its recent dramatic improvements in productivity? In 1831, French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to examine its prison system and returned with a vision of democracy so profound it has become part of our cultural heritage. More than a century and a half later, renowned British business philosopher Charles Handy retraces Tocqueville's intellectual journey, this time focusing not on democracy but on capitalism. The result is an eye-opening look at some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning business in America today. It is America's optimism that Handy finds most striking, the unquestioned belief that tomorrow can--and should--be made better than today. He contrasts this with the Spaniards when they came to the New World: No haya novedades, those Spaniards would say, "Let nothing new arise." The energy engendered by American optimism, coupled with the Puritan belief in work and in the nobility of earned wealth (as opposed to Europe's furtive attitude toward its nobility's inherited wealth) lies, in Handy's view, at the heart of America's success. Will American capitalism, born as it was from a property-owning democracy, now adapt to a dematerialized world, where property is intellectual rather than physical? Handy draws no absolute conclusions, but rather lays out the challenges that must be overcome for tomorrow to indeed continue to be better than today in this still-young country.

Commerce↗
PubMed1995

The new equation.

What the formula doesn't say is what happens to the other half of all workers, the half no longer needed. Nor does it make clear that as well as being paid twice as much, the favored half will also have to work twice as hard. Hence the paradox that half of the people have money but no time, and the other half have time but no money.

Commerce↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Balancing corporate power: a new Federalist paper.

In an effort to govern their increasingly complex organizations, chief executives in some of today's largest corporations are turning to one of the world's oldest political philosophies-federalism. Given that organizations are seen more and more as minisocieties, the prospect of applying political principles to management makes a great deal of sense. Federalism is particularly appropriate because it offers a well-recognized system for dealing with paradoxes of power and control: the need to make things big by keeping them small; to encourage autonomy but within bounds; and to combine variety and shared purpose, individuality and partnership, local and global. As London Business School professor Charles Handy explains it, federalism responds to these paradoxes by balancing power among those in the center of the organization, those in the centers of expertise, and those in the center of the action--the operating businesses. The centers of federal organizations meet regularly, but they do not need to live together. Doing so would concentrate too much power in one place, whereas federalism gets its strength and energy from spreading responsibility across many decision points. Guided by five principles, federalism avoids the risks of autocracy and the overcontrol of a central bureaucracy. It ensures a measure of democracy and creates a "dispersed center" that is more a network than a place. That's why Asea Brown Boveri CEO Percy Barnevik calls his sprawling "multi-domestic" enterprise of 1,100 separate companies and 210,000 employees a federation. It succeeds because the independent bits, be they individuals, clusters, or business units, know they are part of the greater whole.

Commerce↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Looking ahead: implications of the present.

On its seventy-fifth anniversary, HBR asked five of the business world's most insightful thinkers to comment on the challenges taking shape for executives as they move into the next century. In "The Future That Has Already Happened," Peter Drucker examines the effects of the increasing underpopulation of the world's developed countries. With growing imbalances in labor resources worldwide, he writes, executives in the developed countries will need to improve the productivity of knowledge and of knowledge workers to maintain a competitive advantage. Esther Dyson's article "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" reveals the mind shift executives will need to make in a networked world, where companies will be known for what they do rather than for what they say. Executives will have to respond openly and intelligently to feedback about their organizations. The old language of property and ownership no longer serves executives, writes Charles Handy in "The Citizen Corporation." The corporation should be thought of no longer as property but as a community, where members are regarded as citizens. Technology has given executives more information than today's machines can help them understand, explains Paul Saffo in "Are You Machine Wise?" Machine-wise executives will know when to turn their computers off and take their own counsel, he writes. Peter Senge's article "Communities of Leaders and Learners" urges executives to reject the myth of leaders as isolated heroes and instead to build a community of leaders. Sustained institutional learning, he writes, requires organizations to reintegrate their typically fragmented learning processes.

Administrative Personnel↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Through the organizational looking glass: you can't plan tomorrow's organizations with today's assumptions.

It's hard to imagine what our industrial society would be like if, for instance, there were no factories. How would things get produced, how would business survive? But are we, in fact, an industrial society? Are factories going to be the prime production place for a society that is conserving energy and doesn't need to travel to work because the silicon chip makes it more efficient to work at home? Who knows what the impact of energy conservation and women in the work force will be on future organizations? One thing we can be sure of, this author writes, is that whatever tomorrow brings, today's assumptions probably cannot account for it. We are, he asserts, entering a period of discontinuous change where the assumptions we have been working with as a society and in organizations are no longer necessarily true. He discusses three assumptions he sees fading--what causes efficiency, what work is, and what value organizational hierarchy has--and then gives some clues as to what our new assumptions might be. Regardless of what our assumptions actually are, however, our organizations and society will require leaders willing to take enormous risks and try unproved ways to cope with them.

Efficiency↗