The Will to Win by Robert Herjavec

Author:Robert Herjavec
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781443409889
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2013-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

19

The Organic Organization

I’m not the first person to recognize a similarity between companies and living organisms. I think I may be one of the most enthusiastic believers in the idea, however. I see businesses as following a path from birth through adolescence and maturity to partnership. They often produce offspring and eventually suffer death from one cause or another, including old age. The good ones have passion, the exceptional ones have purpose and all are subject to ailments such as hubris, smugness and arthritic immobility. Sure sounds like people to me …

When you examine the needs of living organisms, including corporations and human beings, from a psychologist’s standpoint, it becomes almost a management course in itself. The best illustration of this is Maslow’s theory, which describes the hierarchy of needs, an idea developed back in the 1940s.

Marketing professionals use it as the basis for many of their strategies and tactics.

Maslow’s theory, named for American psychologist Abraham Maslow, is designed to identify the process leading to self-actualization, defined as an inner need to become everything that an individual is capable of becoming. It’s all a matter of fulfilling your potential by meeting goals you set for yourself.

The theory encompasses five levels of needs, and you proceed to the next level only when you have satisfied all the needs of the current level. Also, within each macro level is a hierarchy of individual levels that must be satisfied in turn. Here are the five levels. As you read them, imagine the needs applying to a business organization as well as to yourself.

Level 1: Physiological Needs

Air, water, food, shelter, sleep

Level 2: Safety Needs

Protection, security, order, stability

Level 3: Belonging Needs

Family, friendship, community, work relationships

Level 4: Esteem Needs

Respect, status, achievement, recognition

Level 5: Self-actualization Needs

Personal growth and fulfilment

The first level covers all the physical requirements of an organism. Without air, the organism doesn’t survive. Without food and water, it wastes away. Without shelter, it succumbs to exposure and the elements.

Once the physical needs are met, the organism looks for ways to protect itself and ensure its longevity, moving to the second level. Safety becomes a primary concern, along with a need for a reliable supply of food and other essential resources of the first level.

With basic physiological and safety requirements met, the needs grow psychological in nature. What’s the point of merely existing if you lack friends, companions and reassurance that you really matter in the grand scheme of things? The organism begins to seek love and esteem, goals that fill levels 3 and 4.

Level 5 is at the top of the needs hierarchy, the place where all living creatures with personal consciousness and identity want to be. At this level they are easily distinguishable from other creatures around them, the ones competing for all the resources on the lower levels.

Now apply this analogy to corporations. They need a location with facilities to carry on their business—offices, factories and warehouses fit here on the first level. Next comes obtaining security and safety, creating an atmosphere in which to do business free of immediate and fatal risks.

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