Maslow on Management

Further Notes on Salesmen and Customers . . .

We should be able to institutionalize all the democratic, communicative, respecting, loving, listening, customer satisfaction kinds of things in the future by using the advantages of technology. In other words, keeping all the benefits of smallness but also capitalizing on the benefits of bigness.

The enlightened-type salesman and the enlightened customer are both based on the assumption of a good and worthwhile product. If the product they turn out is not good, then this Y type of management will destroy the whole enterprise, as truth generally will destroy untruth and phoniness and fakery. Another way to say this is that Theory Y management works only for virtuous situations, where everybody trusts the product and can identify with it and be proud of it. Contrariwise, if the product is not good and must be concealed and faked and lied about, then only Theory X managers, customers, and salesmen are possible. Countrariwise, if Theory X is actually used, then this indicates possible mistrust of the product and a mistrust of the rationality of the customer (assuming that he doesn’t have sense enough to pick the best product, and assuming he is stupid enough to be fooled and swindled by irrelevant data). Actually, this suggests that the measurement of the level of the customer rationality would give us an indication of what type of management ...