Fleadom is freedom in the jungle

By VICKI JAYNE

According to Charles Handy, I am a flea. It might sound demeaning, but it puts me in very good company - his own.

When the British management guru and author first embraced fleadom, the life of an independent contractor 20 years ago, he was in the vanguard of a major shift in workplace structures.

It was then the "era of the employee". Workers mostly belonged to one of the many organisational elephants, companies that confidently strode the economic stage unaware of pending technology impacts such as the internet.

Since then, the global flea circus, that growing band of independent consultants, itinerant talent, niche service providers, contractors, leased skills, and SOHOs (small office/home office workers), has flourished.

Some were pushed by corporate restructuring during the 1980s, others leaped as the electronic cottage arrived in the '90s.

Contracting became commonplace and by 1996 two-thirds of British businesses had only one employee, the owner.

Meanwhile, the elephants that remain are getting bigger but not necessarily more profitable. In a fast-paced world, they struggle to overcome their innate ponderousness and must deal with an increasingly hollowed-out structure.

That structure is one outcome of e-commerce's ability to directly link customer to product sources, squeezing out middle processes.

Not only are companies losing or outsourcing former core activities, whole industries (banking for one) are changing in the face of this "disintermediation" or loss of middle.

It's a process that presents some challenges to states as well as corporate elephants, as they adapt to a world that is both more global and more local in its outlook.

These changes and where they might lead over the next 20 years are issues addressed by Handy in his latest book, The Elephant and the Flea (Century Hutchinson, $59.95).

Handy is in Auckland this week, and speaks to a breakfast hosted by the University of Auckland business school this morning.

In keeping with the shifts in perspective towards the more personal on one hand and more universal on the other, the book is both autobiography and overview, a sort of flea's-eye view of economic and social trends.

As a fellow flea, it's comforting to find shared dilemmas. When I went freelance nearly three years ago, it was my second time as a flea. The first foundered less from lack of security than lack of stimulation.

In his first years as a flea, Handy also found that the flipside of freedom from organisational constraints is the allied freedom from organisational purpose and a ready-made social network. As he wryly notes: "Fleas don't flock".

It can be a lonely job, setting your own direction and priorities, discovering the self-priming pump that sustains activity.

Handy cites the need for passion, lack of community, and pursuit of self-learning as among the tensions people must resolve to be successful.

He and his wife, Elizabeth, now set a yearly agenda that enables both to pursue their own passions, his as writer/teacher, hers as portrait photographer.

To achieve a balanced mix, they "chunk" their time into blocks of paid work, house work, community work, study work and time out for holidays and leisure.

He believes this kind of "portfolio thinking" will increasingly enter the organisational world.

Signs are already there, he says, in the new emphasis on work/life balance "as if the two were separate concepts".

Critical of corporations' single-minded obsession with keeping shareholders happy, he thinks today's elephants will struggle to survive unless they take note of employee and community needs and values.

Elephants, he believes, face four big challenges.

The first is how to grow while remaining small and personal. A tendency to gobble up others of their kind has made many elephants bigger in terms of turnover and global stretch. They are also more dispersed geographically and functionally.

In the interests of removing fixed costs, work done in-house is now outsourced or handled by business partners.

Handy cites a piece of old Sufi teaching as relevant to this "relationship economy".

"Because you understand one, you think that you must also understand two because one and one make two, but you must also understand 'and'.

"The new dispersed organisations are now discovering how much is involved in that little connecting word."

Handy has an answer for this first challenge - federalism. A tried and tested, though often little-understood political system, it is a structure that allows regional (or individual) autonomy to flourish within a wider community of mutual interest.

"Putting it to work in business organisations is recognition they are communities [that] have to be led, influenced and persuaded, rather than commanded.

"Their citizens demand a voice in their future, want to be trusted and need to be given opportunities to grow."

The second challenge of combining creativity with efficiency involves a bit of well-managed alchemy - the encouragement or importation of innovative thinkers.

"Elephants need fleas scratching their skins to help them see the obvious before it's too late," he says.

The third challenge is how to be prosperous but socially acceptable.

As companies like Nike, Shell and Monsanto have discovered, elephants are damagingly conspicuous when they blunder into market sensibilities.

The turnover of some corporate leviathans exceeds that of some smaller countries, so people want them to be responsible and accountable for their actions.

The fourth challenge, how to reward both the owners of ideas (employees) and the owners of the company, traverses the interesting territory of who owns what in the virtual world of an economy based more on intangibles than tangibles.

Handy's book is an invigorating mental ramble with one of management's best-known fleas.

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz