‘The individual circle used to be populated in my mind by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – Physiological, Safety, Social, Self-Esteem and Self-Actualization,’ said the young chief executive.
‘And now?’
‘I don’t see people anymore as self-centred beings intent on meeting their own needs, be they the “lower ” ones or some form of self- fulfilment or self-realization.’
‘There is certainly quite a lot of self in all those words and concepts,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Like you, I cannot believe that we are quite so self- preoccupied. But aren’t our needs the key to motivation? I know that it is now the dominant way of expressing it, but the more I think about it the less adequate it seems. Once I acted as consultant to an organization in Dubai. Itinerant workers from 15 different countries were engaged upon a major harbour-building project. The chief executive did some research and discovered that the common factor among them was their love for their families – the desire to do what our grandfathers used to call bettering themselves, to give their children better opportunities. It led me to reflect that love is the force that drives us – love of ourselves first…’
‘But surely self-love is a bad thing?’
‘You may be confusing it with selfishness, the state of being concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself, so that one concentrates on one’s own advantage, pleasure or well-being without regard for others. Grasping greediness is always ugly. But that is quite different from having a sensible regard for one’s own happiness or advantage. Is it also not against the tenet of self-love to aspire to use one’s talents to the full, or to enjoy what recognition comes our way? We are told to love our neighbour as ourselves, which means to seek their good as we naturally do for ourselves.
‘Secondly, love of family is very powerful. The most immediate and natural senses of the word love relate to the attachments of family. For most of us the “nuclear family” is the epicentre of widening concentric rings of attachment. And, as the psychologist C A Mace noted, The radiant warmth of the human heart varies with the sum of the social difference.
‘Another natural love that motivates us stems from our social nature, the love of belonging. The love of the particular group or team, even the organization itself, can be as powerful as the love of family. Sometimes it is not the cause that keeps the soldier from running away but a resolve not to let down comrades who have never let him down. Patriotism, love for one’s country, is a wider form of our capacity to love those social groupings to which we belong, ones that inspire our devotion.’
‘With the environment under such threat, isn’t there another love motivating us now: a love for the whole human race on earth and for this precious blue planet that is our common home?’
‘I hope so. The equivalent of national selfishness is still a world problem and will be for years to come, but millions of people are now quietly coming to think of themselves primarily as human beings; members of the human race and – in Socrates’ phrase – citizens of the world. Only secondarily do they see themselves as nationals of this nation or that.’
‘We are capable of loving ideals, too,’ added the young chief executive. ‘We have this remarkable capacity to love abstract things, such as honour, truth, kindness, goodness, beauty, excellence in all its forms. We love to create new things and to achieve things. So, in place of all those need-based psychological theories, I propose the love principle.’
‘It may not make your fortune as a management guru,’ I said with a smile, ‘but it’s a very interesting idea. By the way, you mentioned that we have a love to create. Creative thinking takes place in the minds of individuals, but it takes a team to innovate – that is, to develop the individual’s creative idea and eventually to bring it to the marketplace in the form of a new product or service.’