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