Charles Handy Quotes

Handy warns that counting everything is easy but ignoring the unmeasurable leads to false conclusions, a blunt guide for skeptics.

13 quotes

  1. '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.'

  2. The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.

  3. Passion is born of vague hopes.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning.

  7. Purpose, pattern, and people, the three P's at the heart of life.

  8. We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.

  9. In a knowledge economy, a good business is a community with a purpose, not a piece of property.

  10. We should see schools as safe arenas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents... for taking responsibity for tasks and others people, for learning how to learn... and for exploring our beliefs about life and society.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms.