Charles Handy made his name as the champion of what he calls the modern “portfolio career”: no more jobs for life. He started his working life as a business person: an oil company executive. In the 1960s he began the second stage of his portfolio career, helping to set up the London Business School. His third big job has been as an author of books about business, management and life in general. Combining striking metaphor and profound common sense, they include The Empty Raincoat, The Gods of Management, The Age of Unreason and The Second Curve. In this podcast Charles Handy reviews his own portfolio, regrets the replacement of the company by the corporation, and suggests some important things that businesses and organisations have to learn, or relearn.

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is an expert on innovation and a critic of how many companies try to do it the wrong way; he is co-author of the book Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People to Bring Great Ideas to Life. Originally from Denmark, he now lives in New York where he is working on a new project trying to improve the way that the world goes about tackling its problems. Thomas W-W talks about his ideas to Peter Day, and explains what he learnt about business problem-solving from a shelter for abandoned dogs in Los Angeles.

In this second podcast, Professor Carlota Perez lists some of the things that need to be tackled in order to turn the huge uncertainties of the current technology revolution into a golden era of inclusive prosperity.

Professor Carlota Perez takes the long view of economics..the very long view. Her particular field of interest is long cycles stretching out 50 years or more, and often starting with the shock of big technology changes. She teaches at the London School of Economics, the University of Sussex, Tallinn University of Technology and University College London, and she has written a much-praised book: “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”. In this first podcast, she tells Peter Day about the economic cycle we are now in the middle of … and how it’s similar to (and different from) previous big cycles which are not really understood by business people, politicians, and even economists themselves.

Julia Hobsbawm says we are drowning in data and deadlines, and we need to correct the balance between the personal and the always-on networked world that has rapidly become the way that most of us live. Julia Hobsbawm was the world’s first professor of networking (at the Cass Business School in London), and she’s the founder of the knowledge networking firm Editorial Intelligence. She talks to Peter Day about the ideas in her new book “Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload”.

Vlatka Hlupic is professor of management and business at the University of Westminster in London. She’s also a consultant and author of the book “The Management Shift”. She tells Peter Day how companies can discover systematic ways of building humane organisations fit for innovation and prosperity in the 21st century.

Businesses are people, profit..but first of all purpose, says Bob Collymore. He has been CEO of the mobile phone company Safaricom in Kenya since 2010. It is the company that introduced mobile money to Africa 10 years ago, under the brand name M-Pesa. What was designed as a send-money-home service for people living far from their villages has developed into a vital arm of the economy, adding microloans for solar power and micro savings for healthcare to its range of services. Bob Collymore explains what inclusive prosperity means–and might mean–in Africa.

Alex Adamopoulos is the founder and CEO of the international digital business consultancy Emergn Limited, based in Boston Mass. He tells Peter Day why he’s a champion of products over corporate projects..and how (in Peter Drucker’s words) “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.