I think I found out about this book from Slate when they were doing their pieces about memoirs quite a while ago. It had ended up on our Paperbackswap list and showed up in the mail.
Handy did something that very few people were doing in the early 80s---he went portfolio (aka freelance). He did it at a time when everyone was still quite happy to work for large, slow moving corporations---elephants. He notes that he was ahead of the curve, as was his wife who was doing this long before he was. Many more people at the time he wrote the book (2001) were working as fleas (jumping from assignment to assignment, contract to contract, job to job). One number that he quotes is that by 1996, 67% of British businesses had only one employee.
Since this experience sounds compelling based on the self quoted sales figures of his business books, I anticipated Handy's writing to be compelling. While it wasn't unreadable, nor uninteresting, it wasn't quite what I thought it would be as Handy tended to meander his way through his stories, focusing in on bits that did not tend to mesh well with other bits. For example, thoughts on the speed of modern communications were tacked on to a more on message section covering the influence of the Internet on the economy.
There were two parts of the book that I found very interesting and would have liked to read more about. The first is Handy's experience working for Shell in the 50s and 60s. That was an elephant of the elephants. He told how Shell employees did everything. No contracting of cooks, janitors or anyone else. An employee living overseas was given all elements he needed to live there including domestic staff and recreational outlets (Shell cricket or rugby teams) not to mention the expected help with housing and schools. It sounded like one was given a great life and ushered through the management structure as an expected result of long term employment and not rocking the boat. I would hvae been very interested to hear more about this sort of life and the experiences of others inside Shell and other elephants.
The other section that was very interesting was about how Handy and his wife divide their lives to support each others' livelihoods. For six months of the year, his wife is acting as his administrator as was as working on her background research for her photography books and works. During the other six months, his wife is actively doing photo-shoots and he helps her by editing her books and supporting her shoots while he works on research for his books and talks. It is a great strategy and they are able to chunk their time well and each work on their own passions while supporting those of the other. Very cool.
Overall, a pretty good read with some neat ideas and observations here and there, though it does not come together very well as a whole.
