This Day in Business History (Birth of Psychologist Abraham Maslow)

April 1, 1908—Abraham Maslow, a psychologist whose theories involving humanistic psychology helped transform the study of health, education, and especially business management, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Russian-Jewish immigrants.

I became aware of this major influence on late 20th-century thought in two different ways within the same year. In December 1983, in a special issue celebrating its 50 years of publication, Esquire Magazine devoted its entire issue to “50 Who Made the Difference,” in which a host of famous contributors wrote about various people who had influenced American life over the last half-century.

I wasn’t surprised to find such luminaries as John Ford, Edward R. Murrow, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, McDonald’s magnate Ray Kroc, and computer pioneer Robert Noyce. But Maslow was a new one on me. The author of the profile, George Leonard, wrote that to Maslow, “man was not a mass of neuroses but a wealth of potential.”

Six months later, while taking a business management course, the textbook and the lecturer constantly referred to this thinker and his “pyramid of hierarchical needs,” outlined in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962). At the bottom of this pyramid were man’s basic needs for food and shelter, which could be satisfied by simple wages. Progressing to the top of the pyramid led one to self-actualization, which Maslow defined as "the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc."

It took awhile for Maslow himself to reach the full extent of his potential—something he recognized implicitly by explaining that self-actualization was an ongoing process. As a youngster he was painfully shy and neurotic, “the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighbourhood.” He had to work up all his nerve to defy his father’s insistence that he study psychology or go against his wishes in marrying his cousin Bertha. Later on in his life, Maslow had to struggle against that same shyness when lecturing and propounding his theories.

At the beginning of World War II, with the Nazis wreaking damage right and left, Maslow had a revelation. Watching a patriotic parade, he was moved to tears. (Nowadays an academic’s watching a patriotic parade, let alone being moved by it, is startling in and of itself.) At this moment, he felt that he needed to turn away from experimental psychology and toward “a psychology for the peace table.” In the process, he could take into account “all the problems that nonscientists have been handling - religion, poetry, values, philosophy, art.”

In contrast to Sigmund Freud, Maslow and colleagues Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Gordon Allport and Charlotte Buhler believed that happy, well-adjusted people were as worthy of study as those suffering from psychopathologies.

After a long period of ill-health, Maslow died in 1970. But if anything, his theories have only gained ground since his death. Other psychologists have followed his lead by testing his theories in practice, and one of his books, Eupsychian Management, has been revised, republished and (thank God!) retitled as Maslow on Management by John Wiley and Sons. His thought has continued to influence such theories as Douglas McGregor, Rensis Likert and especially the late management guru Peter Drucker.

Over the years, I have been stunned by the fact that in the business world, so many managers who have gotten their MBA’s or at least taken management courses that exposed them to the thinking of Maslow could have turned out to be such miserable SOBs. But perhaps they have never really figured out how to apply his thought in their own lives—much like why so many Christians find it hard to deal in a Christ-like manner with others.