Posted by 
Address by Kate Handy at the Peter Drucker Challenge Awards Ceremony, 6 November 2025
All today I have heard my parents in my head. Primarily a Handy twinkle, as I’m not sure my father really believed in having lots of leaders.
He did believe in leadership, though – don’t panic!
Dad would see leaders as more like gamekeepersthan the traditional tour guide model.
You know the type: umbrella in the air, standing in front … “Follow me, just listen to me and only look at what I point at.”
Whereas gamekeepers are passionate about their area and keep it as safe as possible, with some obvious routes to take but allowing the individual to explore and discover and possibly get a bit uncomfortable, but curious.
My parents believed that leadership was within us all.
Not the leadership of winning but the art of creating a community of curiosity for the benefit of all.
Dad was never a leader in his own family. My mother was definitely the boss. He did not parent from in front but more as a reflective observer …. Which did not always work, to be fair.
His Irish family thought he was a bit fancy and seeking of world appeal, and my mother’s very British Army family didn’t understand him at all, as he didn’t play sport or shoot…. He read books and went to plays. He really couldn’t win!
Famously, one night as he was courting my mother, her parents asked where they were going. “We’re going to see Hamlet …” A rather puzzled look passed between them as they said, “I don’t think we know him, who are his parents?”
We are here at the Forum to focus on the “second curve”. Dad wrote the book of that name 10 years ago for his grandchildren, to introduce them to a world he was trying to predict and give them some insights. They are now all in their late teens and still haven’t read it!
He then wrote 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges, breaking down his advice and observations into 21 ideas for them. They haven’t read that one either. But that’s family for you. By his last book, The View from Ninety, published just a few months ago, I think he had despaired of his family and he dedicated it to his late wife with the words, “To Liz who expected great things of me but never explained what they were”.
The idea of the second curve was to disrupt the phrase, If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Well… it depends what broke means, doesn’t it.
Dad would challenge that broke is anything that isn’t energy giving, inspiring or evolving. This is the age of convenience and comfort. We need this disruptive thinking and approach more than ever. Why is there meant to be only one right answer or way?
Together my parents helped individuals and companies create a ”still life of five objects and a flower”. No tech. This way the values and talents could be displayed as a work of art … a reminder …a challenger.
Keeping that image of a still life in focus, every individual or group can keep reinventing itself, creating the second curve. Acting like a multi-faceted diamond, changing colour and lightdepending on the new angle or adventure, rather than just a smooth marblewith one game to play and then you are out.
The second curve needs to be the way we think about everything. Not only our businesses, but our relationships, our health and our planet.
Dad used to say that he was on his third marriage. There would be a gasp, a theatrical pause, and then he would say, “But luckily to the same woman”. They had a second curve in many aspects of their life.
It was dangerous. What if the challenge would make them walk away?
A fear of change, a need for stability and comfort: these are all enemies of creativity.
The second curve not only takes creativity, it takes bravery. When to do it. How to do it.
Dad was never an answer-at-the-back-of-the-book kind of man. Believe me, people have looked and asked.
He was the master of the great question.
What is work for? What is enough? What exactly are you trading your time, energy and talents for?
What next?
He loved the Ernst Schumacher quote: “Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns .. but that is of interest only to the pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge ofsomething much better … that we become oak trees. Oak trees grow by spreading out into the unknown spaces.”
Second-curve thinking is to inspire us, not to live our lives to feed the pigs (or fat cats, as my mother called them), but to strive for those unknown spaces.
My parents would love the oak tree conversations taking place in these rooms and in these essays. This forum, so creatively curated by Ilse and Richard, was the one place my parents came back to again and again.
They did not do repeats – they didn’t even like repeating cooking recipes. So, it is a mark of their deep respect and love for you both and you all.
Kindred spirits as my mother would say.
So, thank you for the invitation to continue our family presence here tonight, and please raise your glasses to Richard, Ilse and the Drucker team for creating a community of curiosity for the benefit of all.
About the author:
Kate Handy is head of a multidisciplinary clinic in London and daughter of Liz and Charles Handy.