A seat at the table of an oracle

There is a diaphanous calm about the Handys' flat in Putney, where milky walls melt into the blond woods of a lounging kitchen and pale rafters lean ever so lightly towards the ecclesiastical. Near a window, with its view of ghost-grey trees, a large white stone stands alone on a shelf, placed there as reverentially as a tabernacle, and chiselled in its smooth surface are three words: The Hungry Spirit, the title of Charles Handy's latest book but much more than that, a restless agnostic's probe of the heavens.

The trouble with Handy, though, is that he doesn't fit easily into any definition. Business guru, management sage, social philosopher, national treasure, a brave and passionate teacher . . . he's been called the lot over the past 20 years, yet none quite captures the idiosyncratic reach of his particular evangelism. His own preferred description is simple: ''I'm a writer and a thinker.'' However, even that doesn't explain who Charles Handy really is. One commentator described his creed as ''Protestantism shorn of God'', while others have likened him to the holy fool of ages, a mocked prophet of the obvious we hear but do not heed.

Yet that's not accurate either, for Handy is the man who coined the words downsizing and portfolio careers, two phrases now lodged in the revolution transforming all our lives. At Shell International he had been a high-powered marketing and education executive and later a professor in managerial psychology at the London Business School, but, at the age of 49, in a move which seemed uncharacteristically reckless, he suddenly rejected the security of institutions. With scant financial safeguards for his two young children but with the encouragement of Elizabeth, his wife, Handy upped and left both the corporate and the academic bunker to downsize himself into what he now preached: a portfolio worker, in this case embarking on a freelance writing career from home.

That was 16 years ago and now the genial voice with its avuncular intonation reaches millions through Handy's regular Thought for Today on Radio 4's flagship Today programme. But it is the books which have earned him that curious place in a pagan world, the role of secular mystic. He might dispute the term but The Age of Unreason, The Empty Raincoat, Beyond Certainty, Waiting for the Mountain to Move . . . these are titles anointed with religious aura. And now there is also his Monday night series on Radio 4, Re-inventing God. So, how much of an unbeliever is this son of a Church of Ireland archdeacon? At 18, preparing to leave the family vicarage in Kildare for Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a First in Greats, he vowed never to be poor and never to attend church again.

Today, though, if God and Mammon can be reconciled, then Handy might claim the patent. ''Well, I do believe that there's a numinous something else, but I cannot personalise it in the way my parents obviously did.'' As in his broadcasts, much of The Hungry Spirit's imagery is unequivocally religious, which brings us to that sacred talisman, the white stone. The one on the shelf in the kitchen-living room is a reminder of two much smaller and more companionable stones sent to Handy on separate occasions by unknown disciples. Their significance

stems from the Book of Revelations, that passage he once drew on in Thought for Today, which reads: To the one who prevails, the Spirit says, I will give a white stone. Handy keeps one stone on his desk here in Putney. The other resides in the Norfolk home where he does all his writing, its sublimely tranquil study featuring windows which are tall and faintly gothic.

''I mentioned the white stone initially about two or three years ago and as a result the first came anonymously in the mail. Then, after The Hungry Spirit was published, another arrived from someone who'd been reading the book on a plane and felt the least he could do was find me a white stone to show his appreciation.'' Whether in that transformed labourer's cottage in Bressingham, his Norfolk village, or in this London flat, the stone has become symbolic of Handy's inner self. ''I look at it and ask: 'Are you being honest?' It's so easy to pretend, you see. But Elizabeth is my real white stone. She is the one who very firmly keeps me true to myself because I get very flattered by all sorts of people.

''Only yesterday someone was here, trying to urge me to join a task force with Simon Rattle

But experience has taught him always to defer to Elizabeth in matters concerning his public persona. She was the one who urged him to break out of the institutional mould and, as a professional portrait photographer she, to some extent, controls his image. Handy muses: ''People say: 'Oh, it's all right for you, because you've made it . . .' But actually it wasn't all right those 16 years ago. I'd left full-time employment, given up professorships, and really had no income, but I knew that I'd been acting a rol

Given the chance, would he also include Adam Smith, another of his inspirational heroes? ''Yes, mainly to talk about his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which concerns a decent society and understanding our fellow creatures . I think he'd be a bit like me: shy, introspective, nervous, bottled-up, yet I'm sure that at heart he was a nice man.'' Perhaps Archdeacon Handy, too, would be among the guests, for the son feels closer to him now than when his father was alive and that provokes a tumult of emotions: pride, delight, guilt, and unresolvable regret.

''I think he might have been frightened of me, you know. He didn't have the words. I have the words and that can make you seem intimidating.'' Why? ''Because you appear more articulate, more self-confident. A lot of people despise me, and that's upsetting. They're irritated by me, think I'm a bit preachy and pious.'' Tiresome, some say, and every time Handy hears the names of those critics, the hairs tingle on the back of his neck. ''I recognise that, yes, I might come across that way but I've got their names engraved on my heart and some day I'll buy them a drink. How can people think I'm so awful?''

Of course, that is very often the lot of a prophet. But what is lacking today, in Handy's view, is a Francis of Assisi, the saint who revolutionised religion by making it, as he describes it, ''bottom-up''. We remember the story of the birds, Handy says, but we've forgotten the Franciscan message that religion belongs to everybody, not just the hierarchy. So, Francis would be at the table, and who else? ''Lorenzo Medici, because he proved that even a banker can bring cultivation to society.'' In which case who is the modern Medici? Well, we can forget bankers but Handy considers Bill Gates, the boss of Microsoft, may yet rise to the role.

''It could have been Murdoch. Like Gates, he is extraordinarily good at making money. If I had him at the table I'd say: 'Rupert what for? Just to give your kids jobs? It'll ruin them. OK, you're great, you're powerful, you've proved you can do it. You control the world, but what for? To be even more powerful?' He could have done so much that was good and he hasn't. A dreadful shame.''

But any mention of Murdoch these days leads back to talk of books. Will they find room on the shelf of the future, along with any universal white stone? Charles Handy believes they are imperishable because nothing will ever quite replace them. And suddenly, amid laughter, he acknowledges the unnamed sage who forecast that the computer would soon be so small you could cuddle it under your arm and lose yourself in it during rush hour on the Tube. If that sounds reminiscent of something, might it not be a book?

n Charles Handy: The Hungry Spirit. Hutchinson, #14.99.