Book Review: Maslow on Management

The basic theme in Maslow on Management by Abraham Maslow is “enlightened” management. What I found particularly interesting was Maslow’s commenting of contemporaries like Drucker, Likert, McGregor, Argyris, Rogers, Skinner, et al. He writes for example that Skinner stressed “again and again and again … on predictability, on control, on lawfulness, structure, etc.” and how infrequently words like “creativeness, improvising, spontaneity, expressiveness, autonomy, and the like …” were used (p. 227). Maslow was clearly ahead of his time, and he is ahead of ours. “Traditional” management is still much more common than the “enlightened” management Maslow so brilliantly and convincingly argues for. Maslow’s expectation was that enlightened management would change the whole society toward improvement and therefore, could be considered revolutionary. It is a very slow revolution indeed.