Preface

In general, we have a tendency to “personalize” businesses and other kinds of organizations, as well as markets, as something autonomous, often unaware that they owe their existence to people like you and me. Everything, from ideation, to planning, producing and marketing and consuming, including waste, is within the human domain. For example, the price of financial capital, being fixed by supply and demand, is nothing less than the result of consumer behavior. Thus, profitable business growth is contingent upon earning consumer trust, which again is a matter of inspiring employees to do so. Inspiration depends on the extent to which our skills and our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs and aspirations are substantiated.

Wealthy persons often remark that money is not everything, that in striving for wealth they neglect certain needs and aspirations and disclose a lack of self-actualization. Other people complain about falling short of the money necessary to realize their dreams. In both cases, the need for inner and outer rewards is prominent. This necessitates integrating material and non-material needs and aspirations, or balancing mind and matter self-satisfactorily. Imbalances in this respect could lead to serious psychological complications (see pp. 15-16).

Inspiring employees to increase productivity implies matching business demands and competencies (skills, preferences and attitudes) with equitable working conditions. If each of us, employed by a business or otherwise, could be satisfied with his or her job, pay and other working conditions, as a cornerstone of self-actualization (see epilogue, p. 107), businesses would enjoy better performance at lowered labor costs. This would benefit society as well.

Realizing their full potential in this process, employees would be less likely to risk unnecessary health hazards, such as child abuse and exploitation of women, polluting the environment, selling unsafe products or other unethical behaviors. Instead, self-actualizing through raising productivity would serve the interests of all parties concerned.

Productivity (see p. 18) specifically covers competency and consumer trust, soft economic aspects, and profitability, the hard economic aspect.

That brings us to the objective of this book: connecting the self-actualization of employees with managing business demands to balance soft and hard economic factors resiliently.

This resilient balance of immaterial and material components is what The Marriage of Self-Management and Managing Business Demands reflects.

Humanizing businesses in order to profit may not be a new idea except from this angle (see p. 11), but it still sounds like a fairytale, partly due to cultural differences and partly to the illicit dependency of politics on businesses. The impact of the latter on society should not be underestimated. The majority of economies in the world are ruled by big corporations and many governments surrender their power and behave like puppets, ignoring acumen and foresight. Thus, businesses finance politics and science, expecting to be paid back later with unfair favors and ending up in vicious circles.                                                                                                                                                  

Throughout history, mankind has used capital, politics, science, technology and even religion to wield power, subconsciously hoping to find some form of self-fulfillment or happiness. Basically, it is this desperate fight between mind and matter that is the major force behind corruption, poverty and war; nevertheless, the cutthroat competition for superiority still continues.

This duality of mind and matter causes a lack of self-actualization and distorts the authentic self-worth of a great many people, inflicting self-alienation, damaging the capacity to empathize genuinely and to be engaged and causing indifference to societal trust (see the practical effect of empathy, p. 19). As a consequence, extremism, climate change and desertification have become part of our everyday reality.

This treatise on personal, business empathic, moral and profitable leadership synergy addresses the underlying paradigm in presenting a culture-free remedy.

Roy Bhikharie                               

March 2008