The Elephant and the Flea by Charles Handy
“We all need somewhere to belong. There is a loneliness in going it alone that is the other side of freedom.”
3 Main Messages:
Life without work is a life without a point
Portfolio careers require balance, determination and self-motivation
We all need to live life the way we think it ought to be lived.
There are currently just over 32,000 schools in the UK, which employ over 600,000 full-time teachers. When compared to the largest UK employers such as The Compass Group (Morrisons, Costa Coffee, Subway, Starbucks etc and employer of 595,000 worldwide) this is a significant number of influential people, not including part-time or support staff in schools. While split into different sectors and into smaller, individual school settings, the majority of these practitioners follow the Department for Education (DfE) guidance and regulations. The DfE, according to Charles Handy, is the elephant in this situation, and one which I have left.
In 2005 I began my NPQH and this was preceded with a short course at the Institute of Education in London. I forget now the specifics of the activities or speakers, bar one; I approached her at the end of her session and thanked her for an inspiring lecture. She said that she had been observing me over the previous few days and felt I had strong leadership qualities and recommended that I read The Elephant and the Flea. As an enthusiastic learner I promptly bought and started to read it but found it had little relevance for me at the time and so it has sat on my school bookshelf unread for many years.
Last summer, when I left behind a 25-year career in education, I had the luxury of having plenty of time and headspace (pun intended) to re-read (or complete reading) all of my collected leadership literature and so turned to Handy’s book at last. I was astounded to find that a book written 20 years ago about his experiences 40 years ago would be so perfect in my current state of thinking and situation; it could have been written for me. Like me, he has worked in London, America and Singapore. In fact many of the similarities are surprising.
Again, like me, Handy left the world of working for ‘elephants’ in his late 40s and started as a self-employed ‘flea’. He writes about finding that his “empty appointments diary was not a delight, but a worry”, which is just the stage which I was experiencing when I read the book. He compares portfolio work to crop rotation where “the ground needs the occasional change as well as invigoration and some fallow time to give it a real rest.” I too find that I work best when my day and week is made up of a patchwork of activities.
Just as Handy did, I found myself reading, researching and exploring a number of different paths while I tapped into my experience and skills and wondered what to do next. Handy talks about following passions, as his wife did when following her dream to be a photographer. He explores the need to regulate and shares advice and lessons he has learned from living in three different continents.
Handy wrote this book in 2001, making astonishingly accurate predictions about the way that many of us work 20+ years later. He showed incredible insight into the potential of the internet and online working in providing the ‘fleas’ of the world with the opportunity and means to create a living from portfolio work. Not all of this work is paid. Handy writes about mixing homework (cooking and cleaning), study work, gift work and paid work, providing an alternative view of what ‘work’ is, which reflects my own values and vision.
Handy’s journey in the book is inspiring and still relevant today. Perhaps mid-late 40s is a time of change because it is when we are faced with our own mortality, or brave enough to go alone, or tired of working for ‘the elephant’, or many other reasons. Perhaps it is a reflection of wanting more out of life. As Handy writes: “We have only one life, we need to do more with it than merely survive.” I could not agree more!
And so, as I start on this next chapter of my career, enjoying the freedom of ‘fleadom’, I take great comfort in knowing that this is a path well-trodden by those brave enough to take it. Handy falls back into his passion for teaching and I have found myself doing the same. After all of my explorations and research I discovered that I gain the most satisfaction and pleasure from teaching, learning and working with people, hence my decision to set up my own consultancy and coaching practice.
There is wonderful freedom to be had in working for yourself; I am enjoying the flexibility of being able to work wherever and whenever I choose and to take holidays and spend time with family whenever I wish. But, after 25 years of working as part of the machine, I can still feel daunted and vulnerable and so, like all fleas, it turned out that my first step was actually a leap! A leap that filled with excitement and opportunity. I highly recommend it!
