Maslow on Management

The Birth of Enlightened Management

the 1960's, renowned psychologist Abraham H. Maslow spent a summer sabbatical at a small technology company, observing his ideas about motivation being put to the test. While there, he wrote Maslow on Management, about "enlightened management," describing the type of workplace that would be most conducive to the workers' reaching a point of self-actualization (happiness). If we adhere to the concept that management is hardware and leadership is software, what he is really writing about is leadership - although he calls it management. Although the book influenced some other management theorists, such as Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, it was apparently a little too advanced for the time, and perhaps it is still so.

Enlightened management assumes that everyone prefers to be a prime mover rather than a passive helper.  And what follows are the 36 principles of enlightened management as defined in Maslow on Management:

1. Assume everyone is to be trusted.
2. Assume everyone is to be informed as completely as possible of as many facts and truths as possible, i.e., everything relevant to the situation.
3. Assume in all your people the impulse to achieve...
4. Assume that there is no dominance-subordination hierarchy in the jungle sense or authoritarian sense (or "baboon" sense).
5. Assume that everyone will have the same ultimate managerial objectives and will identify with them no matter where they are in the organization or in the hierarchy.
6. Eupsychian economics must assume good will among all the members of the organization rather than rivalry or jealousy. a. Synergy is also assumed.
7. Assume that the individuals involved are healthy enough.
8. Assume that the organization is healthy enough, whatever this means.
9. Assume the "ability to admire"...
10. We must assume that the people in eupsychian plants are not fixated at the safety-need level.
11. Assume an active trend to self-actualization--freedom to effectuate one's own ideas, to select one's own friends and one's own kind of people, to "grow," to try things out, to make experiments and mistakes, etc.
12. Assume that everyone can enjoy good teamwork, friendship, good group spirit, good group homonomy, good belongingness, and group love.
13. Assume hostility to be primarily reactive rather than character-based.
14. Assume that people can take it, that they are tough, stronger than most people give them credit for.
15. Eupsychian management assumes that people are improvable.
16. Assume that everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, disrespected.
17. That everyone prefers or perhaps even needs to love his boss (rather than to hate him), and that everyone prefers to respect his boss (rather than to disrespect him)...
18. Assume that everyone dislikes fearing anyone (more than he likes fearing anyone), but that he prefers fearing the boss to despising the boss.
19. Eupsychian management assumes everyone prefers to be a prime mover rather than a passive helper, a tool, a cork tossed about on the waves.
20. Assume a tendency to improve things, to straighten the crooked picture on the wall, to clean up the dirty mess, to put things right, make things better, to do things better.
21. Assume that growth occurs through delight and through boredom.
22. Assume preference for being a whole person and not a part, not a thing or an implement, or tool, or "hand."
23. Assume the preference for working rather than being idle.
24. All human beings, not only eupsychian ones, prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.
25. Assume the preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in contrast to being anonymous or interchangeable).
26. We must make the assumption that the person is courageous enough for eupsychian processes.
27. We must make the specific assumptions of nonpsychopathy (a person must have a conscience, must be able to feel shame, embarrassment, sadness, etc.)
28. We must assume the wisdom and the efficacy of self-choice.
29. We must assume that everyone likes to be justly and fairly appreciated, preferably in public.
30. We must assume the defense and growth dialectic for all these positive trends that we have already listed above.
31. Assume that everyone but especially the more developed persons prefer responsibility to dependency and passivity most of the time.
32. The general assumption is that people will get more pleasure out of loving than they will out of hating (although the pleasures of hating are real and should not be overlooked).
33. Assume that fairly well-developed people would rather create than destroy.
34. Assume that fairly well-developed people would rather be interested than be bored.
35. We must ultimately assume at the highest theoretical levels of eupsychian theory, a preference or a tendency to identify with more and more of the world, moving toward the ultimate of mysticism, a fusion with the world, or peak experience, cosmic consciousness, etc.
36. Finally we shall have to work out the assumption of the metamotives and the metapathologies, of the yearning for the "B-values," i.e., truth, beauty, justice, perfection, and so on.

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