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Who are you? And what do you believe in? Charles Handy says he didn't really know the answers to these questions until 14 years ago, when he turned 60.

The Irish management guru had for decades helped senior managers to improve the performance of their organisations, and to cope as individuals in the modern workplace. Now he was arguing that work was simply a means to an end, unless it could genuinely be called enjoyable, or valuable to society at large.

"You can't postpone what you want to do," he advised the London Business Forum (LBF), at a breakfast presentation to introduce his new book, Myself And Other More Important Matters. "You should have a horizontal fast track in your twenties just to find out what you're good at and take advantage of this [newly] flexible, loosely structured world, then from 30 to 45 you'll need to bed yourself down in something, unless you want to go independent straight away, and then from 50 onwards you'll probably be preparing for a more independent life, which is bound to come in your sixties. And then hopefully in your eighties you'll still be chuntering away... only slower."

The 300-strong audience of the LBF, which had gathered to hear Handy speak at Waterloo's iMax theatre, had an average age around the middle of this range. Nevertheless, all those present would come away feeling as if they had attended a university tutorial - not only because of Handy's avuncular speaking style and his quaint use of an overhead projector alongside the live video projected onto the huge iMax screen, but also because they would be set some homework.

Handy's wife Elizabeth, a photographer, inspired the exercises in question. She had devised two types of "still-life portrait" in the course of her work, each attempting to illustrate values and beliefs as well as appearances, and her husband encouraged the attendees to consider how they would compose their own.

In the first type, an individual is depicted in at least three separate poses and positions in the same, composite image. The aim here is to represent the various roles played by that individual in life. "The interesting thing is that when [Elizabeth] takes these photographs she places herself and the camera in one place and then she asks people to assume the apparel of the different roles and to place themselves in different parts of the room," Handy said. "Clearly... the person nearest the camera is bigger, and that becomes the dominant role."

He showed the audience Elizabeth's self-portrait in this style. "You can see that Elizabeth the photographer is what she sees as her main identity, and that little person at the back, who is supposed to be looking after me, seems less important than anybody else," he grinned. "This led me to think a lot about identity and who we are."

Elizabeth also asks her subjects "to illustrate their life by bringing to the table five objects and one flower that say something about their life and what they believe in," Handy said. "What would you choose?" he asked. "How would you explain them? And what would they mean?" He showed the audience several examples of the choices made by high-powered businesspeople - including a TV remote control, used to represent someone's belief that they were "a starter, not a manager", and a set of poker chips, used to illustrate the idea that the only things in life worth pursuing involved an element of risk.

Handy was, he confessed, fleeing from risk when he chose his first job out of university. As a trainee marketing executive with Shell, he would enjoy a totally secure career path. However, as it turned out, he would also lose his sense of identity: "When I walked through the door, I was suddenly MKR/32," he recalled. Moreover, after a few months stationed in Singapore, he was asked to become the company's economist for the South-east Asia region, despite the fact he had studied classics at university. He winged the situation thanks to a book entitled Teach Yourself Economics, and says he learned two valuable lessons in the process: (1) potential is always worth much more than experience; and (2) teachers always learn more than students.

"When you leave this cinema today, you will only recall 20% of what I said as you walk out of the door and, by lunchtime, you will only remember 5%. And tomorrow, maybe 2%," he told the LBF audience. "I will remember everything."

Life at Shell was tolerable for Handy - it enabled him to travel widely, live well and meet his wife, after all. But ultimately he found it unsatisfying. "Immersing" himself in the world of management education for 15 years gave him a greater sense of purpose, at the London Business School, the Judge Institute in Cambridge and on the speaking circuit. Nevertheless, he said: "I don't read business books. I think they're terrible. I know them [only] because there's a circuit for these prima donnas. Tom peters is a very good friend of mine, a great guy, he's the Billy Graham of management, he can wow an audience and really get you excited about things... I think we're all cabaret performers. I think if we have any use at all, we send people away thinking a little. It doesn't mean that we have the answers."

Ultimately, he argued, workers are only happy - especially in the context of a large organisation - if they have "enough space in their doughnut". Handy believes all jobs are doughnut shaped, with the core representing essential duties and the matter beyond representing space in which to use personal initiative. The space in his own doughnut shrunk when Shell transferred him from the Far East back to London - ostensibly to promote him, but with a new role that was highly restrictive.

When people are bored they usually take the opportunity to block things, to exercise "negative power", he suggested. And so it was with Handy when he returned to London. "One day a request came in from an Italian company that I was looking after... to build a refinery in the bay of Naples," he said. "Now this was back in the 1960s, so there was no e-mai. This thing came in the mail. And I thought with my classical education that a refinery in the Bay of Naples would rather spoil the scenery. This was disgusting, [I thought], they must find somewhere else to do it. But I had no authority to tell them that. So I tore it up. And told no one. Well, they thought the Italian mail system had let them down again so they sent lots of other copies to lots of other people and it all happened six weeks later, but for six weeks I preserved the Bay of Naples. It's called negative power."

Handy argued that the secret of happiness was not necessarily job satisfaction but simply "doing your best at what you're best at". And he credited Aristotle with this idea, as encapsulated in the ancient Greek term eudaimonia. "It's usually translated as happiness... but actually it's a bad translation. I'm not a classical scholar for nothing," he said. "Aristotle regarded eudaimonia not as a state of mind or a state of being but as an activity. It's doing, not being. It's more accurately translated as flourishing, or 'doing your best at what you're best at'. If you believe that's what life's all about then the priority for anybody involved in education or management is to find out what you're best at, and then to give you every opportunity to do it."

If the principle of eudaimonia were allowed to proliferate, he concluded, "Then you'd have a flourishing organisation and a very fulfilled and energetic and exciting population."