Charles Handy Quotes
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Citizenship is the chance to make a difference to the place where you belong.
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Passion is born of vague hopes.
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A leader shapes and shares a vision, which gives point to the work of others.
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If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.
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Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning.
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We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.
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Presidents, leaders, to be effective have to represent the whole to the parts and to the world outside. They may live in the centre but they must not be the centre. To reinforce the common sense they must be a constant teacher, ever travelling, ever talking, ever listening, the chief missionary of the common cause.
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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.
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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.
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Creativity is born of chaos, even if it is somewhat difficult to glimpse the possibilities in the midst of the confusion.
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Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists.
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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.
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This is just a preliminary study of this facility.
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Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.
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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.
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We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational processes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage.
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I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
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It is tempting to call for better leadership, but we probably expect too much from the leaders of the nations. Those nations are too big, the connections not strong enough, the commitment to the future not long enough. It is better to look smaller, to our now-smaller organisations, to local communities and cities, to families and clusters of friends, to small networks of portfolio people with time to give to something bigger than themselves. We have to fashion our own directions in our own places.
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The world by and large has to be reinvented.
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In a knowledge economy, a good business is a community with a purpose, not a piece of property.
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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.
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There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
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You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.
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The market is a mechanism for sorting the efficient from the inefficient, it is not a substitute for responsibility.