Maslow on Management

322 Pages·1998·1.1 MB·English

by  A.H. Maslow

MASLOW ON
MANAGEMENT
ABRAHAM H. MASLOW
with
DEBORAH C. STEPHENS and GARY HEIL
This book is dedicated to my daughters, Ann and Ellen.
Contents
Foreword to the New Edition vii
Introduction xv
Abraham Maslow: The Man and His Work xix Preface to the First Edition xxi
The Attitude of Self-Actualizing People to Duty, Work, Mission
Additional Notes on Self-Actualization, Work, Duty, Mission 5
Self-Actualized Duty 17
Different Management Principles at Different Levels in the Hierarchy 18
Enlightened Economics and Management 20
The Neglect of Individual Differences in Management Policy 43
The Balance of the Forces toward Growth and Regression 45
Memorandum on the Goals and Directives of Enlightened Management and of
Organizational Theory 48
Regressive Forces 53
Notes on Self-Esteem in the Work Situation 55
Management as a Psychological Experiment 67
Enlightened Management as a Form of Patriotism 81
Relationship between Psychological Health and the Characteristics of Superior
Managers, Supervisors, Foremen, etc. (Notes from Likert) 88
Further Notes on the Relationship between Psychological Health and the
Characteristics of Superior Managers (Notes from Likert) 94
Memorandum on Enlightened Management 102
By-Products of Enlightened Management 105
Notes on Synergy 108
The Synergic Doctrine of Unlimited Amount of Good versus the Antisynergic
Doctrine of Unlimited Amount of Good 112
Addition to the Notes on Synergy 129
Memorandum on Syndrome Dynamics and Holistic, Organismic Thinking 134
Notes on the B-Values (the Far Goals; the Ultimate Goals) 149
Notes on Leadership 152
The Superior Person-The "Aggridant" (Biologically Superior and Dominant)
Person 167
The Very Superior Boss 177
Notes on Unstructured Groups at Lake Arrowhead 188
Notes on Creativeness 220
Addition to the Notes on the Creative Person 229
Notes on the Entrepreneur 231
Memorandum on the Redefinition of Profit, Taxes, Costs, Money, Economics,
etc. 236
Additions to the Notes on Profits 244
Additions to the Notes on Redefinition of Profits, Costs, etc. 247
The Good Enlightened Salesman and Customer 250
Further Notes on Salesmen and Customers ... 257
Memorandum on Salesmen and Salesmanship 258
On Low Grumbles, High Grumbles, and Metagrumbles 266
The Theory of Social Improvement; The Theory of the Slow Revolution 279
The Necessity for Enlightened Management Policies 292
Bibliography 297
Index 307
Foreword to the New Edition
37 YEARS LATER
It's amazing, isn't it, that a book out-of-print for almost 37 years, a book that just
barely sold its first printing and then virtually vanished from view-into oblivion
really, without even a whimper-has suddenly burst upon the scene, piquing just
about everybody's interest. Intriguing thousands of Maslow fans and thousands
of others who mistily remember his name from their undergraduate classes or
when phrases like selfactualization or peak experiences or hierarchy of needs
come to mind or scroll across their computer screens.
Why the book disappeared still bedevils me. Maybe it was the title. I had
implored Abe to use a more reader-friendly title but who was I to challenge the
maze of phrases and seductive writing. The original publishers, though, went
ballistic but Abe stubbornly held out for, yes, Eupsychian Management.
But more likely, it was the times. A rather complacent industrial America,
famously supreme since World War II, was not particularly interested in
business books, especially by a psychologist who had no business experience to
speak of. In addition to that daunting title, Abe writes in a discursive manner-
thought pieces, nuggets thrown about, rough drafts, like artists' sketches or finger
exercises for the violin.
The entries in this book were transcribed word-for-word from his journals. When
Abe first showed his journals to me, I said very forcefully, "you must publish
them." He resisted for months, said they were just "works in progress," only
drafts, "not academic," "I'm new to this field," and so on. One excuse after
another. Finally, reason prevailed. I talked him into publishing his journals and
then found a publisher whose editor, I'm sure, didn't truly appreciate the book's
meaning, asking me in confidence if English was Abe's second language.
There are sections of the book that are hilariously innocent and other parts which
are terrifyingly prescient and penetrating. But there are no neat little formulaic
paradigms-if you can bear reading that word one more time. Nor are there 19
Rules for Effective Anything. What you will experience throughout this
marvelous book is a genius-at-play with all of his elegant ruminations, a
thoughtful writer who throughout his life cultivated a beginner's mind. As he
thoughtful writer who throughout his life cultivated a beginner's mind. As he
says in the Preface, "A novice can often see things that the expert overlooks."
He takes on and challenges the major management figures of the 1960s who
were then writing about the industrial workplace, notably Drucker, McGregor,
Rogers, and Likert. Always in a friendly, nonadversarial way, but in a way that
you know must have turned those iconic heads. Drucker claims that Abe wrote
this book to bring him and McGregor down to earth. I doubt that that was the
primary motive, but Abe certainly does question the assumptions of those giants.
But as you continue reading, I hope you'll notice some other things as well,
many of which I either missed or didn't fully understand 35 years ago.
For example, Abe was one of the earliest figures to realize that, "the industrial
situation may serve as the new laboratory for the study of the psycho-dynamics,
of high human development, of the ideal ecology for the human being." His
prescience was also quite extraordinary. In the last chapter, to take only one
example, he foresees, with terrifying accuracy the eventual downfall of the
Soviet Union and America's future success because "of the growth-fostering
tendencies in industry ... If the Americans can turn out a better type of human
being than the Russians [remember, dear reader, he wrote this at the peak of the
Cold War] then this will ultimately do the trick. Americans will simply be more
loved, more respected, more trusted, etc., etc."
There are two other things about this book I'd like to mention. One is how
politically incorrect he sounds today and how downright courageous Abe has
always been. Read his chapter on the Aggridants, where he discusses the
dilemma of democracy: what do we do with superior individuals? What do we
do with extreme disparities in talent? He tackles issues that everybody ducked in
the 1960s and are still ducking today. Abe has always asked the BIG questions.
This book tries to deal with two major questions or moral edicts throughout but
are worth repeating over and over again: "How good a society does human
nature permit?" "How good a human nature does society permit?"
Maybe that helps to explain my opening questions: Why has the promise of
republication generated such perfervid interest and why did the book so
unceremoniously migrate over to the remaindered shelf so soon after
publication? The first question is a little easier to answer. The problems
organizations face today are far more vexing than the problems they had to
address in the 1960s: globalization, intense competitiveness, galloping
technology, change/change/change. As to the second question, now that I reread
technology, change/change/change. As to the second question, now that I reread
the book, it's very clear. The book raises tremendously threatening questions and
Abe always thought that the primary goal of science was "to shove truth down
the reluctant throat." Maybe our throats or even our minds are now ready for
Maslow's profound medicine.
Abe Maslow requires no explanation or interpretation. He is an open book,
knowledgeable by his words and his treasured person. The first sentence in one
of Abe's most important books, Toward a Psychology of Being, published in
1962:
There is now emerging over the horizon, a new conception of human sickness
and of human health, a psychology that I find so thrilling and full of wonderful
possibilities that I yield to the temptation to present it publicly even before it is
checked or confirmed, and before it can be called reliable scientific knowledge.
It is all there in that one sentence-a sentence that has sentenced psychology to a
new life; that has turned it inside out or more precisely outside in: to gain truth
through personal experience, be a "courageous knower."
Science to Abe was a way of life and love-his poetry and debureaucratizing it (or
as he would prefer-resacralizing it) was his goal. Abe was a conquistador-a lone
one for many years-always advancing with courage and charm like the most
seductive crusader.
He wrote in his last book, The Psychology of Science:
The assault troops of science are certainly more necessary to science than its
military police. This is so even though they are apt to get much dirtier and to
suffer higher casualties, but somebody has to be the first one through the mine
fields.
Science was his poetry, his religion, his wonder. He wrote, also in his
Psychology of Science:
Science can be the religion of the nonreligious, the poetry of the nonpoet, the art
of the man who cannot paint, the humor of the serious man, and the love making
of the inhibited and shy man. Not only does science begin in wonder, it also ends
in wonder.
I quote lavishly from Abe's own work, because his work was his life, and to
know one is to greet the other. I first got to know Abeor encounter him (like
know one is to greet the other. I first got to know Abeor encounter him (like
many of us) through one of his books. It was my senior year at Antioch College,
and while taking a tutorial with the then president, Douglas McGregor, he
recommended a book on abnormal psychology written by Maslow and
Mittelmann.
It was a breath of fresh air. It was a book that really drew me into psychology as
a calling. I'll never forget in this book, in the frontispiece, there were two panel
pictures: one that showed a group of happy-looking gurgling babies in the
maternity room of a children's hospital-newborn babies-and just beneath that was
another panel showing a group of people-haggard, drawn, and sallow-crowded
into the New York subway hanging on, with the most baleful looks, to the straps
above their heads, and through the windows you could see these sallow faces.
And the caption beneath these two panels was, "What happened?" And that's the
question that Abe spent most of his life trying to answer.
That was my first encounter with Abe, and my last was in Buffalo in the spring
of 1968, when he was on his way to Columbus, Ohio, to visit his new
granddaughter and celebrate her birth. At that time I conducted a long interview
with Abe Maslow from which we made a film. He said to me at that time, right
after the filming of our interview, "I have to make an important decision." He
knew at the time that to write at all took all the energy he could still muster. He
questioned, "Have I written all the good psychology I can expect to write?" It
was brought to a head by Bill Laughlin's (chairman and CEO of Saga Foods)
marvelous offer to join him in California. He said, "I hesitated for days and then,
with Bertha's approval, I refused all the other offers from the major universities
to go out West and to spend my full time writing." He said, "I am about to cut
myself adrift from all external circumstances-no Harvards, no Brandeises, I want
to make a last song, sweet and exultant."
Between the first encounter with Maslow and Mittelmann at Antioch and the
visit to Buffalo were crowded many lovely times with the Maslows, shimmering,
genial, and warm visits, always graced by Bertha's effortless sociability (like the
meandering Charles River outside the wooden deck of their Newton home) and
her crowded and sumptuous refrigerator. And always Abe-with that incredibly
soft, shy, tentative, and gentle voice making the most outrageous remarks.
Breakfast with the Maslow family was intellectual nirvana-good and endless
food, good and endless talk-where always I had the distinct feeling of gaining
energy, of being lifted off my feet.
Franck, a Nobel laureate in physics, once said, "I always know when I hear a
good idea because of the feeling of terror which seizes me." In this respect, Abe
was a terrorist-a terrorist always bursting through the barricades of conventional
wisdom and outdistancing the emplaced cannon.
I always sensed, when with Abe, a childlike spirit of innocence and wonder-
always wearing his eyebrows (as Thomas Mann said about Freud) continually
raised in a constant expression of awe. Abe wrote, about Aldous Huxley, what I
consider to be actually an accurate self-description of Abe Maslow:
May I mention one more technique that I saw at its best in Aldous Huxley, who
was certainly a great man-one who was able to accept his talents and use them to
the full. He managed it by perpetually marveling at how interesting and
fascinating everything was, by wondering like a youngster at how miraculous
things are, by saying frequently, "extraordinary, extraordinary!" He could look
out at the world with wide eyes, with unabashed innocence, awe, fascination-
which is a kind of admission of smallness, a form of humility-and then proceed
calmly and unafraid on the great tasks he set for himself.
During those years, Abe was making history by remaking psychology. So many
of the terms, phrases, and concepts now accepted, even into the national
vernacular, are Abe's: need hierarchy, selfactualization, peak experiences. And
all that went into the Third Force of Psychology as Humanistic Psychology.
Anthony Sutich said recently, "Abraham Maslow is the greatest psychologist
since Freud. The second half of this century belongs to him."
If the first half of this century saw modern psychology take the mind and heart
out of psychology, then Abe Maslow, under heroic conditions, disinterred them-
more burnished than before. He wrote:
In exchange for Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, and Horney, we are offered
beautifully executed, precise, elegant experiments which, in at least half the
cases, have nothing to do with enduring human problems and which are written
primarily for other members of the guild. It is so reminiscent of the lady at the
zoo who asked the keeper at the zoo whether the hippopotamus was male or
female. "Madam," he replied, "it would seem to me that that would be of interest
only to another hippopotamus."
For me-perhaps for all humanistic scholars-Abe's core legacy was to revive the
full humanness to science by declaring all of our human experiences capable of