The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  Portfolios of work are not new. Small businesses have portfolios of products or of clients. Large businesses have portfolios of smaller businesses. As more and more people move their paid work outside organizations, or are moved, they are pushed or lured into becoming small independent businesses. They are paid in fees, not wages, and have to develop their own portfolios of customers and of activities.

  From portfolios of customers, or products, it is an easy step to move to seeing some customers as free, some products or activities as non-financial, to include free work in the plans for the week or for the year. The free worker is by temperament a portfolio worker as is the working mother who has always had to juggle the demands of her time, and who knows that the responsibilities are no less just because the money is less. Free work is as serious as paid work.

  Professionals, who charge fees, know about portfolios. So do craftsmen, particularly those who work for themselves by themselves. The plumber, the electrician, the weaver and the potter have to juggle the demands on their time like any mother. Too many customers leaves no room for anything else, even for the paperwork. Too few customers, of course, leaves no money for the bread.

  Portfolios accumulate by chance. They should accumulate by choice. We can manage our time. We can say no. We can give less priority, or more, to homework or to paid work. Money is essential but more money is not always essential. Enough can be enough. Without deliberate choice portfolios can become too full. The irony of modern life is how busy people can be in what is meant to be a time for more leisure.

  It is no bad discipline to calculate the days (or hours) spent each year (or week) on the different parts of the portfolios. My own portfolio, as a professional man in his Third Age, is as follows: 150 days fee work (at varying rates and including provision for administration, paperwork and abortive meetings with clients); 50 days gift work (for various associations, societies and groups); 75 days study (essential to keep up-to-date in my work); 90 days homework and leisure (it is hard to distinguish between the two).

  Ninety days of domestic work and leisure looks a lot. It is salutary to remember that most people take 137 days (52 weekends plus 5 weeks holiday plus 8 public holidays). The danger of a portfolio life can, ironically, be that there is too much work since there is no one to say ‘this is not a working day’.

  Where will the money come from?

  That is always the central issue in planning a portfolio. The answer, once again, is from a portfolio of things. Portfolio people think portfolio money not salary money. They learn that money comes in fits and starts from different sources. There may be a bit of a pension, some part-time work, some fees to charge or things to sell. They lead cash-flow lives not salary lives, planning always to have enough in-flows to cover out-flows when both can be, to some extent, varied. Invoices sent and paid promptly with bills paid late has helped to keep many a small business financed, and portfolio people too.

  ‘What sort of money do you earn?’ I asked my friend Percy as we motored in his Jaguar from his shipbroking office to his house in the country. I was genuinely curious to know what it needed to live in his style.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘To the nearest two thousand, you must know.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t,’ he protested, and then, as I looked disbelieving, he asked, ‘Look here, how much sugar do you use in your house in a year?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Of course not, but I bet there’s always sugar there. So it is with money, I don’t add up the totals but I make sure there’s enough coming in to pay the bills when they come in. If Paul McCartney can go out to work to earn a swimming pool I can do something when I have to pay the parking fines.’

  It sounded very grand but I gradually discovered that that is how all small businessmen quite properly think, although it is not always that easy to find that something to do to pay the extra bills when we need to.

  Portfolio money is a way of thinking. Portfolio people think in terms of barter. They exchange houses for holidays, babysit for each other, lend garden tools in return for produce, give free lodging in return for secretarial help in the evenings. Portfolio people know that most skills are saleable, if you want to sell them. If you love designing houses, design someone else’s; if you like photographing dogs, photograph other people’s dogs; if you like driving, drive other people’s errands – and charge a fee if you need money. The fee can be as small, or as big, as you think fit; small for the first-time seller, big if you feel confident or if you do not really care whether you do it or you don’t. Hobbies can be mini-businesses for portfolio people, their cooking can be their skill, their plants their merchandise.

  Saleable skills and mini-businesses are the wherewithals of portfolio people. If they do not have them they need to acquire them, preferably before they start. This is the almost legal informal economy, only illegal when not declared to the tax man. It is growing rapidly, probably accounting for quite a lot of the gap in every country’s national accounts, the gap between what they know we spend and what we say we earned. In the USA that gap is nearly $10 billion of missing money. We are seeing the consequence of taking work outside the organization, of taking work outside the formal job.

  Portfolio Marriages

  Everyone will live a portfolio life one day for part of their lives. Most people will match that with a portfolio marriage. A portfolio marriage is not a recipe for polygamy, a different partner for each day or night, nor is it an invitation to serial monogamy, a sequence of husbands or wives. Rather it is a way of adjusting a marriage to the differing demands of a changing portfolio in life.

  Marriages have always needed to adjust to the stages of life, through child-rearing, to adolescence, to the empty nest and retirement. The new requirements of the workplace, the move towards more portfolio lives, more paid work for qualified women, more work from home and more telecommuting, the increase in earlier retirement, second careers and Third Age re-thinks, these all have their impact on the marriage. If the relationship does not flex in some way it will break. Too often, serial monogamy or a change in partner is the way many people match their need for a marriage with the need for change.

  Portfolio thinking is one way of changing the marriage without changing the partners. It becomes increasingly important as an accompaniment to portfolio work lives. The idea originated in a piece of research which I did some years ago with Pam Berger at the London Business School. The research set out to explore how some successful managers in mid-career combined their busy executive lives with their family lives.

  Some background is essential. The managers, all male in those days, had all been participants in a long executive development programme at the London Business School. They were in their mid-thirties with good jobs in large organizations. Twenty-three of them agreed to participate in the study. It was therefore a rather special sample, small, successful, well-educated and happily married (or they would not have agreed to participate). We cannot therefore say that everything which this group of people told us applies to all couples or even to all executive couples, nevertheless the marriage patterns which emerged do seem to make sense to a lot of people to whom I subsequently presented the study.

  I knew all the men personally. Pam Berger did not. She therefore did all the interviews and the questionnaires, arranging always to meet the man first at his office, to travel home with him, to meet his wife and children, to meet with the wife alone and then with them both together. They filled in some standard questionnaires, responded to interview schedules and generally talked about the pressures on their lives and how they responded to them. We were looking for practical clues to managing marriages and work. We found none that were common to all. Instead we found a set of marriage patterns.

  In their responses to one questionnaire (the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule) which draws out an individual’s priorities and preferences, this group and their wives had unusually extreme scores on f
our dimensions: Achievement (ACH) or the need to succeed in something; and Dominance (DOM) or the need to have power and influence, which were highly correlated with each other; and Succourance (SUC) or the desire to help and support, which was highly correlated with nurturance (NUR), the work to take care of someone. Both of these, interestingly, corresponded closely with low scores on Autonomy (AUT), the desire to do your own thing. We were therefore able to put these scores together on a chart (see below) and to put an X for the position of each of the forty-six individuals in the twenty-three marriages.

  We then divided the chart into four quarters and gave them letters.

  To make it more interesting we gave names to the four quarters. B was the archetypal western man, achieving, dominant, autonomous with little interest in helping or caring. We called this box the Thrusters. A, by contrast, was achieving and dominant but was at the same time interested in helping and caring for people, scoring low on autonomy. We called the A box the Involved. C we called the Loners, for they scored low on everything except Autonomy, and D we called the Carers because that was what they scored highly on, being uninterested in Achievement or Dominance.

  The box now looked like this:

  It was interesting to note then that the most conventionally successful people (salaries, job titles, etc.) were Thrusters, that over half the women and none of the men were in box D, Carers, that the Industrial Chaplain and the Civil Servants were in box A, the Involved, and that only one of the women, a full-time working wife was in Box B, a Thruster.

  The distribution of the sexes would not be the same today, when at least a quarter of the executives on that programme are now women. This was, after all, in 1974. The world has changed, but probably not the marriage patterns which then emerged from this analysis.

  With forty-six individual crosses on our chart, the marriage patterns emerged when we joined the crosses up to see which was married to which. There are sixteen different possible combinations of the four boxes, but only four of those combinations were relevant to this group. They were:

  — The B-D marriage, a Thrusting man married to a Caring woman (this was by far the most common of the patterns).

  — The A-A marriage, of two ‘Involved’ people, (the second most common pattern).

  — The C-C marriage, of two Loners (there were two of those).

  — The B-B marriage of two Thrusters (of which there was only one in this sample, but probably more common today).

  Each of these patterns was quite different, reflecting the different combinations of the partners’ preoccupations at that stage in their lives, a stage when most of them had been married for five to ten years, had between one and three children and a home of their own.

  The patterns start to come alive when the way these couples lived is described. The B-D pattern was a marriage in which the roles of everyone and everything were clear and separate. It was the husband’s job to earn the living, the wife’s to run the home and look after the children. He looked after the drink in the house, she the food, he tended the vegetables, she the flowers. He had his friends, she hers. There were no overlapping friends except for family.

  Even the rooms had separate roles – there were sitting-rooms and dining-rooms, studies and bedrooms. The children knew their place and their manners and went to bed when told. Conversation at meals was about things or events (‘When is your mother coming to stay?’ ‘What is wrong with the hoover?’) rather than ideas. We asked them what they did when they felt under stress. They moved away from each other, he to dig in the garden or hit a golf ball, she to suffer in silence in the bedroom – separate again. Interestingly, they usually came from the same part of the country but he was two or three years older and had three years more education than her (i.e. had been to university whereas she had not).

  These seemed to be very secure marriages at the time. Everyone knew their role and everything went according to a schedule. Where his work led she followed, managing the home base for his career.

  The A-A marriages were quite different. Here the partners were of the same age and had the same sort of education, in fact in this sample they had usually met at college. In these marriages the roles were overlapping, as were their homes. Both partners worked, although for her it was usually a part-time job. However, both took turns at child-minding and whoever felt hungry did the cooking. The rooms had no clearly defined roles, kitchen, living, dining, study were all one, bedrooms doubled as workrooms, meals were haphazard and casual, the children precocious, advanced or ill-mannered, depending on your viewpoint.

  The lives of both partners were intertwined. All friends were joint friends, all activities joint activities. Mealtime conversations were about ideas, were full of argument and discussion. When they had stress problems they shared them, drinking copious cups of coffee or cheap red wine late into the night then going off to be concerned but achieving workers the next day. Life was intense, interesting and, yes, involved.

  The B-B marriage was different again. It was a very competitive partnership. There were no children and the wife earned as much as her husband in the same line of business. They were, therefore, a full dual career couple with what might be called, at that time, a low-slung lifestyle, low-slung cars, low-slung furniture, low-slung clothes, all quite expensive because they were the dinkies of their time (Dual Income No Kids Yet). They argued a lot, discussed business more than ideas, and took their stress out on each other. The competition however was tempered by mutual affection; they were friendly rivals, so much so that she applied to follow her husband on the executive programme in order not to be left behind.

  Lastly there were the C-C marriages. These were the partnerships of two people very similar in age and disposition and background who each wanted, above all else, to be able to do their own thing. Neither was hungry for success or for other people. They were very self-sufficient and encouraged the same in their children. In one home it was carried to extremes; there was no communal sitting room, no chairs to sit on except in the individual bedrooms. There was a kitchen but each member of the family got their own food. They lived their own lives, timing things precisely in the case of one couple, so that he would arrive home just in time for her to leave to go out to her work with one of them at home with the children. They were content, they said, and happy – two trees together in the wood, together but not touching, or even talking very much.

  One conclusion from all this was just that it takes all sorts to make the world. As we discussed the findings with more people, however, we heard the same comments again and again:

  — ‘It is a snapshot of relationships at a particular stage. It would be interesting to know how they change over time.’

  — ‘My marriage started off as an A-A marriage. We shared everything. But the children came, my job hotted up, we moved to the country and, yes, we are now a B-D couple.’

  — ‘My firm assumes, I think, a B-D marriage because we ask an awful lot from our people and they need a secure base at home with no worries.’

  — ‘I gave up my career when I had the children – I had to because John was terribly stretched at work and could not help – but I hope to get back to work and to an A-A pattern one of these days.’

  — ‘Your chart describes my life, an A-A start, moved to B-D when we had the kids, C-C when they left, and last month we divorced – nothing to say to each other any more, each with our own lives to lead now.’

  — ‘We try to live an A-A life but it has meant turning down two promotions because we would have had to move and I’m not sure that we can continue like this.’

  — ‘We think we try all the patterns in one year. A lot of the time it is a B-D marriage with one stuck at home with the kids, but at weekends it is definitely A-A because we do everything together while we always have separate holidays in the summer -C-C.’

  The chart, I now believe, is a good although crude description of the options open to a relationship. The strong relationship is one that is flexibl
e enough to move from one pattern to another when the need demands. It is a portfolio of possibilities. Most relationships these days start in an A-A mode, a partnership of equals sharing most things. The pressures of a job on one or other of the partners, together with children, lead to a B-D relationship – for a time. In our sample even the competitive B-B marriage moved to B-D when the children arrived, apparently to the satisfaction of the wife.

  Not many women, however, are content today with the D or caring role for too long. They have tasted the excitement of paid work, domesticity is dull and lonely, they would like to mingle some fee work or study work with homework. Ideally, they would like to work back to A-A but this requires the husband to give up some of his priorities for autonomy and independence and move from B to A at the same time.

  If a return to A-A is impossible then B-B is an option, the full dual career. It requires a lot of energy, organization and money to keep two successful careers going and a home. It can easily slip down to C-C with thoughts of achievement and power abandoned in favour of continued independence. It is hard, it seems, to go anywhere from a C-C position except out of the chart altogether.

  More interesting, still, is the possibility in a dual portfolio life of mixing the patterns monthly, or weekly, or even daily. A truly flexible relationship can have B-D days, A-A weekends, C-C holidays and D-B spells (with the man doing the home-making and the caring), or some other combination.