Maslow, as you may recall, was the psychologist who observed that our motivations in life are entirely dependent on our station in life. Basically, hungry people yearn for food, fed people yearn for meaning, and so on. As a global workforce, we’ve been climbing slowly up Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs since the beginning of civilization. The vast majority of human effort throughout that time has been fueled by basic survival needs: food, shelter, clothing, etc. However, the past century has seen monumental changes. Today’s workers are much more evolved, and that makes today’s workplace much more complex. How do you motivate people to perform basic tasks inside an organization when the true hunger in their soul is to experience social connection, or to build better mousetraps, or to change the world? How do you connect those dots so the organization can keep churning forward? These are the questions upon which the future of the workplace pivots. Those who discover the answers and solve the riddles will build kingdoms. Those who don’t will perish, abandoned by a workforce that has moved on.

Maslow was Right.