Preface

In general, we have a tendency to personify businesses, markets, and other kinds of organizations as autonomous things, often unaware that they owe their existences to people like you and me. Everything, from ideation to planning, producing, marketing, and consuming, 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, business growth is contingent upon inspiring consumer trust, which in turn is a matter of inspiring employees to increase productivity in order to earn that trust. Inspiration depends on the extent to which our skills and talents and our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs and aspirations are substantiated.

Wealthy persons often remark that money is not everything and that in striving for wealth they neglect certain needs or desires. They are disclosing 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 nonmaterial needs and aspirations, or balancing mind and matter self-satisfactorily. Imbalances in these respects could lead to serious psychological complications.

Inspiring employees to increase productivity implies matching business demands and competencies (skills, preferences, and attitudes) with productive and equitable workplace practices. If each of us, employed by a business or otherwise, could be satisfied with his or her job, pay, and other working conditions (a cornerstone of self-actualization—see Epilogue), businesses would enjoy better performance at lowered labor costs. This would benefit society as well. By realizing their full potential, and consequently their empathic capacity, employees would be less likely to risk unnecessary health hazards such as child abuse, exploitation of women, polluting the environment, selling unsafe products, or other unethical behaviors. Instead, self-actualizing through raising productivity serves the interests of all parties concerned. Productivity specifically covers competency development 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. In other words, this book aims to explain how to strike this balance of immaterial and material components―work-life synergy. Striking this balance reviews the process of reflecting on, analyzing, making sense of, reframing and/or changing our self and work-life experience self satisfactorily, which is basically a biography of each of us.

Humanizing businesses in order to profit may not be a new idea (except from the viewpoint, I describe―see Introduction), but it still sounds like a fairy tale, partly due to cultural differences and partly to the illicit dependency of politics and science on businesses. The impact of the latter on society should not be underestimated. The global economy is exploited by commerce, trade liberalization, and economic growth for the purpose of narrow corporate interests, neglecting the production and distribution of all resources essential to life; big corporations play a key role in ruling the majority of economies in the world, 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 creating vicious circles of favoritism and unfairness.

Throughout history, humankind 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 corporate abuse, job stress, corruption, (mental) health complaints due to problems at work, and inequity and disparity in general; nevertheless, the cutthroat competition for superiority still continues. This duality of mind and matter leads to 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 connect with others, and resulting in indifference to societal trust. As a consequence, extremism, climate change, extreme poverty, child pornography, cyber terrorism, and wars, among other things, have become a part of our everyday reality.

The problem is how to shift our paradigm to enable us to practice what we think is good for our self and righteousness, and how do we clear our mind or become open-minded to trust our judgment of what is good for our self and righteousness in a way that dignifies perceptual and cultural differences in order to enable work-life synergy for everyone?