Charles Handy’s “portfolio work”
The death in December of Charles Handy, whose The Age of Unreason provided the workplace “revolution” with one of its crucial texts, resonated with me personally because he gave a name to how I’ve always worked. He called us “portfolio workers,” by which he meant that our careers were pursued in parts that, if propertly tended, would add up to a greater sum.
Handy covered a lot of ground in his 1989 book, but what struck me then and remains relevant today is his idea that portfolio work is work’s future.
Portfolio work recognizes that our interests and talents don’t fully match what employers have to offer. This is especially true in the first half of one’s career, roughly, when you’re sorting this out while giving different jobs and firms a try. I write from experience, as I didn’t have a proper full-time job until I was 44. To provide my family with health insurance, I had several nominally full-time jobs at UC Berkeley, but in fact I was out consulting to make enough money to support a household with four young kids. “Fractional” is the term now: I was a fractional marketing director at two architecture firms and freelanced as a plan editor, my entry point to SOM.
I liked this arrangement, as I was paid for every hour that I worked. (Only Gensler routinely paid overtime.) It also gave me more flexibility to work around my children’s schedules and work from home, although this was a barely heated shed behind our house, now my nicely renovated writing “barn.” Across that decade, I taught “How to Write a Thesis” in the graduate Architecture thesis studio, and served a Dean’s and a Chair’s factotum.
When I joined Gensler at 50, I found a firm and a position that matched my main interest and talent exceptionally well. For the next two decades, that work was my main focus, but the portfolio continued, primarily in the research and writing I did with Richard Bender, successively my advisor, Dean-patron, and finally my writing partner until his death in 2022. Our work together, which Gensler encouraged, took me to Europe and Japan, and engaged me in topics like Slow urbanism and the nature of university cities. I gave papers in Singapore and Australia, and I wrote articles. When I retired in 2019, the current Dean at UC Berkeley CED, Renée Chow, invited me to be a Visiting Scholar, a five-year appointment that saw me through the pandemic and enabled me to revisit topics like factory-built housing.
After Professor Bender’s death, I opted to continue the think-tank we founded in Tokyo in 1989 as a vehicle for our research. The Urban Construction Laboratory is tiny, but now has two collaborators, Dr. Elham Hassani of Sapienza University of Rome and Rocky Hanish of Arizona State University. My interest in finding new approaches to urban regeneration led me to Dr. Hassani. Her work on Jaime Lerner’s Urban Acupuncture ideas interested me, and we soon asked Hanish to join us. We’re now proposing an urban regeneration studio at The Design School at ASU focused on Phoenix as a desert metropolis. A lunch with UC Berkeley’s Margaret Crawford led us to her CED colleague Danika Cooper, who taught two studios on Phoenix as a desert landscape with a long history. That kind of deeper background will be important to our studio, too.
Artificial intelligence’s support of the urban regeneration process could finally make urban morphology’s strategies and methods actionable — the dream of Giancarlo De Carlo, a close follower of urban morphology’s Italian school. We intend to make AI part of our studio, building on an AI studio taught by Randy Deutsch at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign last fall. (We had two long conversations with him, and he also published an article about his studio in Common Edge.)
Hanish and I wrote a paper with Dr. Hassani that she gave at a conference in Tashkent in November. She then carried out an intensive, 14-session workshop with students at Tashkent University of Architecture and Civil Engineering (TACQ) that piloted our proposed ASU studio’s use of urban intervention projects. That he and I were “present in Tashkent as speakers and workshop collaborators speaks to what Handy had in mind.
Portfolio work is hybrid work.
A generation of technology innovations make working together across vast distances far easier than it was in 1989. Handy saw in what was emerging back then the glimmer of a far more seamless digital future. The pandemic showed the more-or-less current limits of this, especially in childhood and secondary education, but tertiary education and much of the workforce did fine, which is why hybrid work persists and “back to the office” is resisted.
Handy saw the need to tune one’s career more carefully and frequently in relation to the work on offer, but he also understood, having worked for large organizations like Shell, what a time-sink full-time work can be. Between commuting, meetings to keep managers happy, and mandatory fun, I did about six hours of actual work during my 12-hour days, door to door. Before the pandemic, the commute got particularly brutal, the trains so full I could no longer sit and read. Hybrid work is helpful in that there’s a definite need for the immersion that in-person provides, but office work is rarely an immersion. It’s a stop-and-start affair that makes focused work hard and makes it difficult to organize your days. It’s also out of sync with our bodies, which need to pause, to walk, to nap, to decompress. Some workplace designs go to elaborate lengths to accomplish this, but hybrid work that makes room for self-orchestration does it (or makes it) better.
Handy intuited that the workforce would want this freedom. But he also grasped that human performance is a dialogue between each of us and her environment. In a career, there are major and minor influences. When you’re young, family is often a major one. An avocation significant enough to be a leitmotif to your day job is another, especially if you find yourself wondering how far you could take it. A portfolio is to say that they’re all in play. (This is why I was shocked when a design professor at Berkeley criticized a friend for taking two hours away from studio every Saturday to weave. Two hours! In architecture, bad habits can start in school.)
Art Gensler, by far the best architecture firm leader I ever encountered, stated as a principle that when the workday ends, it’s time to go out and enjoy everything else life has to offer. Mixing with clients at events after hours is one way you befriend them and make a relationship of what many architects see as a transaction, he noted, but your family and friends, your interest in culture, your desire to paint, do standup, or make pottery, or just take a walk, is the difference between feeling fully human and much less so. It matters. We perform best when our lives are fulfilling.
Charles Handy, long an observer of organizations, and those who form and run them, shared this view. How you orchestrate your life is a lifetime project. I’m 78, and I’m still tuning the portfolio, deciding what’s major and what’s minor, what I can profitably focus on (and how), and what can be safely set aside. It’s easier when you only answer to yourself, but keep in mind that in reality, that’s always the case. Luck and fate play big roles, but the life you make is ever and always your own project, not anyone else’s.
