Article by Charles Handy on how businesses should and need to take charge of their futures and meet new and changing demands. Handy identifies the strategic question in modern business as how to balance activities, that is, what to put in an organization's core and what to put in the space around it, and how every organization is grappling with the need to be both centralized and decentralized, global and local, tight and loose, differentiated and integrated, etc. He contends that one way to meet these contradictory challenges is to create work groups where people are responsible for accomplishing certain tasks, but have the independence to choose how such tasks can best be completed. Such an arrangement, according to Handy, would result in the formation of organizational cores, and the goal is to provide them with defined paths of success. From these organizational cores will come portfolio individuals with portfolio careers, marketing their skills to employers on a part-time basis. Handy then concludes that businesses must become more like communities, rather than solely profit-driven instruments for their owners, in order to retain the best employee talent.
Handy, Charles B Gibson, Rowan Organization theory Organizational behavior Organizational change
Source
Article by Charles Handy on how businesses should and need to take charge of their futures and meet new and changing demands, 1999; Charles Handy Papers; Box 15, Folder 4; 2 pages
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