Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow

I had dinner tonight with Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre hotel group and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Chip is a really interesting guy and clearly self-actualizing in terms of his own needs-line.  He is a closet writing junky in addition to CEO of a very large, 3,500 employee organization and is asked to speak all over the country on how Maslow's hierarchy can inform corporate performance.  It's a great book and brings a developmental hierarchy to relevant ground for leading employees, suppliers and investors.  He is single-handedly spawning a movement and resurgence of Maslow.  Wonderful, and it reminds me that we need a similar treatise on a broader scale for integral.  (If no one has written it in 5 years than I will.) 

We also discussed the wonderful and irresolvable dialectic of pursuing multiple goals - personal, artistic, and creative versus organizational, leadership-like and professional - simultaneously.  I think this is the nature of an integral life, holding the paradoxical dimensions of multiple lines of intelligence and energy at the same time and accepting that balance on the micro-level is a myth. 

But it also strikes me that in the dynamic tension between peace and passion - which are my terms, respectively, for the state of resting in our innate transcendent everpresent perfection (peace) and the ever-ongoing striving to transcend our current forms and limitations and fulfill a unique life mission (passion) - in this constant tension between these ever-present dualities that something gives way in the creative process and they merge.  That is, in the clarity of the egoless peak creative state, we are both completely and timelessly present while also deeply engaged in the passionate expression of an evolutionary impulse.  Our peace and passion merge at the height of the creative state, and we become a channel for things that afterwards we can barely even recognize as our own.  (And barely even are they.)

Comments

[Kevin Champion]

I find much of this to be very true in my experience as well. However, I am often skeptical because for me the ultimate passionate expression usually comes at the cost of a great deal of peace (to use your terms). I idealize that if I were doing things right, integrally, I would be in balance and this would not be the case. But so often the fulfillment of my most Eros driven and highest creative expression seems to come at the cost of peace in my relationships.

I wonder if you might explain more what you mean by, "accepting that balance on the micro-level is a myth"?

[Siri Dhyan Singh]

Robb,

thanks for the tip on this. I really like the segment of his video clip on amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/mRJ65XC3C8LZ3

"How do you create meaning for your employees . . . listen one third of my employees clean toilettes for a living and if I can learn to actually create a sense of meaning for our employees by cleaning toilettes, I bet you can do it for your employees too."

It's cordial and at the same time blows nay sayers out of the water effortlessly.