THRIVING ON CHAOS The Need for Self-Actualizing Leaders

In 1987 Tom Peters wrote a book by the title Thriving on Chaos. As the co-author of In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies and then A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference, Tom Peters has been a leading thinker in the field of business for many decades. As with many other seminal thinkers in fields, I went back to read Thriving on Chaos to more fully understand Peters and how the fields of business, leadership, and management had been changing over the years. I went back to read a classic, but was I surprised.

What was the surprise? The biggest surprise was the relevance of the book! Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution was anything but “old.” Beginning from the idea of “a world turned upside down” Peters wrote over two decades ago as if he had a crystal ball into today. And to offer practical guidance, he couched his ideas as prescriptions for the revolution. The major sections of the book indicate the relevance of the book: Creating Total Customers Responsiveness Pursuing Fast-paced Innovation Achieving Flexibility by Empowering People Learning to Love Change: a new view of Leadership at all Levels Building Systems for a World Turned Upside Down

Foreseeing the changing of the world, Peters writes about the difference that numerous factors are making and will make: technology, globalization, information explosion, the change of the work force as people develop, etc. He writes about the importance of quality and flexibility, the need for flatter organizations, a new focus on service, customers, and responsiveness, the need for empowering people for making decisions, solving problems, facilitating innovations, and adding value. The book is as current as any book on the market today in terms of offering practical steps for creating a cutting-edge company.

Of course, I read the book through a particular frame—through the lens of Self-Actualizing Psychology. This is the psychology that uniquely governs everything that we do in Neuro- Semantics and the psychology that created NLP. And it is also the missing frame that pulls together almost all of the initiatives in business to become more effective, productive, and profitable. That is, what all of the pioneering thinkers in business, leadership, organizational development, management, etc. have been building up to for decades and have tried to articulate in so many different ways—is pulled together and given a governing framework by Self- Actualization Psychology.

There are many factors contributing to this: the rising of the standard of living, the increase of a

more educated work force, globalization, etc. These things have not only advanced our technology, they have affected human consciousness itself. Human consciousness has been evolving and growing and rising to new levels of awareness. And this has been changing businesses and the way we do business. And this evolution is just beginning. A new human being is in the process of emerging. The time is coming when the old forms of leadership (authoritarian command-and-control) and the old forms of work (hierarchical, bureaucratic, leave your brain at the door, do what you’re told without questioning, etc.) will be completely irrelevant.

Self-Actualization Psychology focuses on the nature of people under conditions of health and growth. It’s about human nature when it moves beyond the animal level of the lower needs to the truly human needs— the drive for meaning, for meaningfulness, to make a difference, to create, for beauty, order, excellence, legacy, and all of the things that makes us fully alive and fully human. It focuses on how we become fully what we are capable of becoming. Unlike all of the other schools of psychology which provide models that explain how people go astray and suffer various distortions and pathologies, Self-Actualization Psychology models excellence in human nature.

What Self-Actualization Psychology offers business is a very powerful and unifying framework. Even though many of the details of a humanistic work place has been envisioned and described, the framework has not. The framework has been missing. What business needs is the framework that explains the reasoning why the best companies are creating flatter organizations, firms that empowers people, that is customer focused, that seeks to add value, that recognizes the many forms of meta-pay that we can create in the workplace. The emphasis on quality, participative management, visionary leadership, deep democracy, recognition and engagement of employees— why all of these things makes sense in human psychology.

These are the elements and expressions of people at their best. They are descriptions of people who move beyond “the jungle” of the lower needs and seek to contribute, make a difference, and find meaning even in their work. And surprisingly, Tom Peters wrote about the details of the new twenty-first century workplace in 1987. He foresaw the need for several completely new attitudes— for managers to treat employees, suppliers, and customers as partners in a common endeavor. He foresaw the need to not only deal with change, but for leaders and people to actually love change and develop the capacity for a flexible adaptiveness. He foresaw the shift to constant innovation at all levels in an organization by everybody, the use of self-managed teams for leading innovation, the importance of engagement, the de-bureaucraticizing, the remaking of middle management’s role, the elimination of humiliating Mickey-Mouse rules, the deference to the front-line, and the ultimate importance of listening by leaders.

Pretty incredible, wouldn’t you say? In the book, Tom Peters writes— “The chief reason for our failure in world-class competition is our failure to tap our work force’s potential.” (p. 286) And that’s why we need Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies— which is what the book, Unleashing Leadership (2009) is about.