Research & Writing

The Elephant and the Flea

The Elephant and the Flea
Looking Backwards to the Future

Charles Handy

Hutchinson, Random House, London 2001

For the Fifty Plus Executive looking for a story that speaks to a future outside organizational life, this is the book that will best serve as the model for rethinking that future. After all, Charles Handy first coined the phrase "portfolio career" in the early 1980's and since then we have seen a larger number of people living this life. With the increasing interest in this life model, it would seem that many more authentic stories have yet to be seen and heard.

As Handy says in the first chapter, he was looking for a way to explain "why large organizations (elephants) needed irritant individuals or groups (fleas) to introduce innovations and ideas essential to their survival". But telling his "going portfolio" story in the book, across the wide sweep of global work changes , the message is all for the fleas.

Reading this book when it first arrived, Handy painted for me in his authentic voice all the possibilities and the realistic challenges of the "independent life" in a flexible later life career. Not that you can't be 30 and have this reality, but there is a particular appeal (though underscored in career discussions up to now) for the Fifty Plus.

If Handy encourages anything through the telling of his story, it is that you need to be eclectic in your thinking - exploring more of who you are reflected in what you do, learning to "do different" and that in"chunking the work" you may find yourself cutting across the grain of your past patterns of life.

While for some, portfolio careers may not be a choice it may be a case of waking up one day finding you are doing it anyway. Little makings of Handy's "fleadom" will most likey be lived successfully when communities of fleas connect - not just on the need to network but to learn from the challenges of the pilgrimage.

I revisited this book again, three years on and realized that there is so much more confidence and vocabulary a flea needs to develop if it wants to buzz in the ears rather than living on the hide of an elephant. Should there be fleadom courses for the fifty plus?