Maslow on Management

Additions to the Notes on Profits

I am reminded here of the parallel between the accountant’s necessity for having everything down in numbers and those authoritarian organizational theorists who have to have all the human and interpersonal relationships in any organization reducible to a chart on the wall with simple lines and simple geometric forms.

Observe that much of the difficulty in the conception of profit, taxes, costs, and so on, can be seen to come from the professionalization of the accountants as a group. They are the ones who force upon the industrial situation the concern with numbers, with exchangeable money, with tangibles rather than intangibles, with exactness, with predictability, with control, with law and order generally, etc. Andy Kay pointed out that the accountants have the lowest vocabulary scores of any of the professional groups. I added that the psychiatrists think of them as being the most obsessional of any group. From what I know of them, they also attract to the schools of accounting those who are number bound, those who are interested in small details, those who are tradition bound, and the like.

In the colleges and the universities, with all their educational policies and intellectual goals, the accountant types and other obsessional types somehow manage to force an overemphasis upon the interchangeability of credits, of grades, of diplomas, ...