I recently acquired a copy of a 1965 book by Abraham Maslow, long out of
print, with the improbabe title of "Eupsychian Management." The book is a
collection of journal entries reflecting Maslow's ruminations on
leadership and the workplace. The book critiques and mostly reinforces
Douglas MacGregor's Theory Y, which was in currency at the time, but goes
well beyond it by analyzing work and management in the context of the
motivation theory for which Maslow is undoubledly better known.
I was stunned at how wide-ranging and visionary this work is, drawing from
Maslow's studies of the Blackfoot Indians, the nascent Civil Rights
movement, notions of quality management (long before TQM) and even the
principle of continuous improvement (long before kaizen reached the U.S.).
Just a few miscellaneous nuggets:
--"Better managers are better perceivers."
--"Enlightened management is one way of taking religion seriously,
profoundly, deeply and earnestly."
--On enlightened management generally: "What we have here necessarily is a
kind of holistic thinking, or organismic thinking, in which everything is
related to everything else and in which what we have is not a chain of
links, or a chain of causes and effects, but rather resembles a spider web
or geodesic dome, in which every part is related to every other part..."
--"If you take something important from the world, then you yourself
become important thereby."
--"The Cold War will be won by the nation that turns out the better type
of human being."
In any case, I may do some writing on this book. I was wondering
if anyone on the list is acquainted with "Eupsychian Management," and can
share any thoughts, recollections or speculations about the extent, if
any, of Maslow's influence in the field of management or leadership. It's
my understanding that his book was widely used in graduate-level
management classes in the late 1960s, for instance.
Many thanks.
Cheers,
Tom Petzinger
tompetz@msn.com
--"thomas petzinger" <tompetz@msn.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>