Maslow on Management

Memorandum on Syndrome Dynamics and Holistic, Organismic Thinking

Good management and good workers and good enterprises and good products and good communities and good states are all conditions of one another and of good, mutual relations. If an improvement in the community does not have an ultimate effect on the goodness of the product, then something is wrong someplace.

The data that I’ve been reading about in the books on management can either be organized in an atomistic, cause-effect, beads-on-the-string manner, and treated like a pile of bits of facts, or they can be perceived in organismic terms, that is, as if they were all related to one another. Now, the latter way is actually more true, more real, more pragmatically successful. For instance, the reason I bring this up at all and would want to include it in any ultimate discussion of the theory of management of an enterprise is that it is necessary to point out that much of the writing on management, and especially the older stuff of the 1930s and 1920s, was based on the atomistic conception of the enterprise, that is, viewing it as if it were a world in itself and had no relationship to anything else, as if it were selfishly conceived. This is on the paradigm of a boss owning a little grocery store and feeling absolutely independent about it and beholden to nobody in the world; he runs it, he’s the boss, and it’s as ...