Maslow on Management

Memorandum on the Goals and Directives of Enlightened Management and of Organizational Theory

... It’s really fantastic that one book after another will make a pious statement about this new development and about organizational theory and management theory all resting on a new knowledge and a new conception of human nature and especially of motivation, and then proceed to say nothing whatsoever about values and purposes except in some vague way that any high school senior could match. ...

The theoretical situation in enlightened management is one respect at least very much like the situation in psychotherapy: an awful lot of people are doing an awful lot of things and doing a lot of talking, and they don’t have the courage to delineate carefully the goals, the purposes, the far aims of all that they are doing. It’s as if they were afraid to talk of values and purposes in the hope again of conforming with nineteenth-century science. But the whole thing makes hardly any sense if the far goals of enlightened enterprise and enlightened organization, enlightened groups, are examined. Just as it’s possible to say bluntly and unmistakably that the purpose or the far goal of all psychotherapy is growth toward self-actualization and toward the metamotivational state which applies in self-actualization, so also can we say that this is the function of any good society; so also is it the ...