Manuscript by Charles Handy on organization flexibility and the necessity of fewer managers. For Handy, flexibility means flexible organizations, with work organized around shifting tasks and priorities, in groups, project teams, and temporary assignments, mixing those inside with some from outside. It also means buying output not time. He proceeds to identify two results that this new flexibility has, namely, more people working outside organizations than inside it, and increasingly running organizations without managers. Handy then notes that work will be plentiful, but that it will come for many in the form of potential customers, not jobs, and that the emerging flexible organization will, ultimately, be horizontal and not vertical, a place where career ladders are short, where they exist at all. Consequently, pure managerial jobs will be few and far between, with life inside busy but short, ending at the age of fifty for most and leading on, potentially, to an independent ‘portfolio’ career afterward.
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