Maslow on Management

The Theory of Social Improvement; The Theory of the Slow Revolution

It is true for now that the rapid spread in this country of the philosophy of enlightened management, which will surely change the whole society toward improvement and therefore, must be considered to be revolutionary.

Since I take holistic theory quite seriously, not only with individual persons, but also with societies and cultures, and any other organismic wholes, the theory of social improvement must also be holistic. What this means mostly is to proceed on the assumption that the society changes as a whole or as a unit, and that everything within the society is related and tied to everything else in the society. One thing that this means is that you can’t improve any society by pushing a single button or by making a single law or changing a single institution or having a particular kind of change in regime or leader or president or dictator or whatever the case may be. I know of no single change that will automatically transform the whole society. (Although it is holistically true that any single change will have an effect on the whole society, even though this may be minute.) In turn, what this means is that the way to change a society must necessarily be to change it simultaneously on all fronts, in all its institutions, ideally even, in all its single individuals within the society (granted of course, ...