The Hungry Spirit
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Amazon.co.uk Review
The Hungry Spirit, by esteemed British business guru Charles Handy, is an extraordinarily eloquent and original treatise on the discomfort that many feel as a result of the overriding quest for corporate profit and personal advancement. Offering a carefully considered and compelling alternative vision, the book challenges the status quo on everything from capitalism and organization to goal-setting and morality. With nods to Kant, Keynes, Sartre and Drucker, The Hungry Spirit is not your usual business tome, but that, of course, is part of Handy's plan.
People Management
‘The Hungry Spirit is the distillation of a lifetime’s experience, a personal recipe for what we have to do to survive in a capitalist society.’
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A brilliant and insightful text on learning to control and live with the dangerous but highly beneficial animal that is "Capitalism". I had to read it twice, partly for pure enjoyment and partly to fully appreciate the concepts and ideas that Charles was championing. A must read for anyone that has an interest in the politics of economics and the workplace. Charles raises many interesting points that deserve or demand consideration. Charles has a brilliant and extremely readable style of writing that draws you in to his world as if he were chatting to you over a few drinks. This book certainly deserves a place on your shelf and his ideas a place in your life.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
As a management visionary Charles Handy is very impressive. I found the idea of the citizen company intriguing. As a social critic he is very eclectic and we are on the whole treated with a hotch potch of ideas, borrowed from numerous sources. Basically he is an old fashioned liberal conservative and from this point of view he reflects 10 years or so ahead of its time the type of Conservatism propounded by the current Tory leadership in the UK today.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you have a serious interest in business or economics then don't read this book. It's one of the worst books on business that I've ever read. Arguing from a position of ignorance is never acceptable. Charles Handy dismisses evolution as mechanical determinism without even bothering to research the subject. He says things like "It is this self-awareness that allows us to develop the idea of progress, an idea which scientists agree is not naturally there in the process of evolution". The evidence that he uses to support this assertion is a conversation that he had with a friend over a bottle of wine on an Italian terrace.
As a scientist with a special interest in evolutionary processes, I can say that he's completely wrong. "Most scientists" don't hold these views and most scientists would probably like to state their own views rather than being misrepresented. Evolution is an information process of learning and therefore not fundamentally deterministic or materialist. In fact the ability to measure information gain by evolutionary process is a major advance of the 20th century. In lay terms, evolutionary processes are analogous to progress. This is the opposite of Charles Handy's clichéd representation of nature/nurture. Evolution evolves new ways of learning (e.g. intelligence) and this is sometimes called meta-evolution. A failure to understand evolution may be forgiveable but not the lack of understanding of the history of growth theory. Failure to understand evolution also indicates a failure to understand Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Robert Solow and Paul Romer. From a so-called business guru, this is an unforgivable lack of research.
As a scientist with a special interest in evolutionary processes, I can say that he's completely wrong. "Most scientists" don't hold these views and most scientists would probably like to state their own views rather than being misrepresented. Evolution is an information process of learning and therefore not fundamentally deterministic or materialist. In fact the ability to measure information gain by evolutionary process is a major advance of the 20th century. In lay terms, evolutionary processes are analogous to progress. This is the opposite of Charles Handy's clichéd representation of nature/nurture. Evolution evolves new ways of learning (e.g. intelligence) and this is sometimes called meta-evolution. A failure to understand evolution may be forgiveable but not the lack of understanding of the history of growth theory. Failure to understand evolution also indicates a failure to understand Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Robert Solow and Paul Romer. From a so-called business guru, this is an unforgivable lack of research.
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