Introduction

In contrast to the idea of multilateralism, the world’s population still diverges economically, culturally, and morally. Thanks to the effort of many nations, some people live longer and enjoy luxury as never before. At the same time, the great majority suffers from extreme poverty. A quarter of humanity lives without electricity, one billion people have no access to safe drinking water, two and a half billion lack proper sanitation, and over three billion earn less than 2.50 American dollars per day. Every second child is born in poverty, and a billion people entered the twenty-first century unable to read a book or sign their names. The more we preach, the more striking the inequity and disparity appear.

Businesses are largely to blame; they create their own so-called codes of ethics to withstand competition, thereby infecting the consciences, aspirations, and empathic capacity of employees and society and robbing them of the true joy in their lives. Working conditions are the key source of job stress and (mental) health complaints. In developing countries, the paternalistic culture of governments has a similar impact.

To explain how to restore the joy of life, I first aim to disentangle the paradigm that upholds the present status quo and explain self-actualization by outlining and substantiating several common interactive faculties as separate and integrative. These faculties are awareness, ego, intuition, sleep-dream, unconsciousness, death, and spirituality. In substantiating these faculties, seven strategic principles of self-actualization are inferred to promote self-management. In this process, we detect our callings and fulfill our potential. This leads to our overcoming inner conflicts, mistaken identities, and mental blocks such as psychological biases, goal-fixation, and limiting growth factors due to the idea of death.

This angle and approach is corroborated by considering several observations. After near-death experiences, some patients reported a clear awareness during out-of-body experiences, in which perception, cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, or memory from early childhood occurred independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness: 100 percent life-reviews of every thought, deed, and how they made others feel—not fragmented and random memories but in sequential order, heightening empathy and intuition overtime. (These phenomena I qualify as the ghost in near-death experiences.) Consequently, the free, self-conscious, and willful integrative function of our ego, as explicated throughout this book, becomes of paramount importance to promoting self-management, including emotional integration, which in turn develops our empathic and intuitive capacity—inner growth.

Also, profiting from this cognitive process, while taking into account productive and nonproductive human factors and workplace practices, eleven main lessons in managing business demands are validated. These lessons seek to realize employees’ vocation or calling, establish the purpose and identity of the business, raise productivity, and build mutual and societal trust. This trust can build the organizational confidence needed to exploit the market in a socially responsible manner, laying the foundation for resiliently balancing soft and hard economic factors—in other words, to create work-life synergy. If we fall short of self-actualization by lack of self-management—thus, experience lack of self-fulfillment—how can we be expected to be optimally productive and empathize? Without self-fulfillment, and thus without genuine empathy, it is difficult to accommodate customers competitively in a socially responsible manner, among other things, and to enable work-life synergy and best compete.

The ghost in near-death experiences learns how vital proper self-management is to integrate our self for inner growth. This capacitates our ability to clear our minds, stimulate empathy and intuition, unfold our potentials, realize our callings, offer good leadership, stimulate productivity, and through these, the achievement of self-fulfillment, and mutual and societal trust, thus adding meaning and joy to our work, lives, and society.

In other words, the ghost in near-death experiences forces self-management upon us as a pressing need to enjoy our work, lives and society. That is the implication of this book’s subtitle. Inspiring employees to raise productivity in this way nourishes their authentic self-worth, integrity, responsibility, empathy, and reliability, which galvanizes passion and results in dedication, competency development, engagement, and mutual, consumer, and societal trust.

This culture-free, psycho-philosophical model for creating work-life synergy addresses the paradigm that could inhibit us from executing the ability to become who we are, fulfill our potential, and enhance productivity, adding meaning and joy to our work, lives, and society. It is carried into effect as follows:

Chapter 1 outlines the function of our common interactive faculties to facilitate self-actualization in establishing mental and emotional health, thus self-worth and empathy in finding self-fulfillment. Empathy helps dignify perceptual and cultural differences, stimulate self-management, and realize employees’ vocation in earning productivity and societal trust. Lack of empathy in managing business demands leads to job stress and unfairness.

Chapter 2 employs productive workplace practices to match business demands and competencies, while raising employees’ awareness to unfold a sense of authentic self-worth. This kicks off the first phase of self-actualization.

Chapter 3 identifies four basic selves, which are navigated by the ego to overcome inner conflicts and mistaken identities. The goal is achieving personal psycho-synthesis and finding our mission or calling, the second phase of self-actualization, which can be inhibited by mental blocks, such as psychological biases, or lack of inner freedom.

Likewise, business demands are similarly managed by integrating an ego-like navigation system (management, mission, vision, goals, and strategies) with the navigation instruments (organizational structure and other means and processes with employees substantiating the rest), thus pulling together the separate parts of the corporate mind in line with the rational scan (rationally scanning the internal and external corporate environment). This leads to corporate psycho-synthesis and establishes the corporate purpose and identity.

Chapter 4 describes the third phase of self-actualization, transpersonal psycho-synthesis. In this phase, which can be inhibited by mental blocks such as goal-fixation, the ego is intuitively assisted as a soundboard to perceive inner sensations and encounters as possible opportunities and/or challenges in order to stimulate ideation and generate personal resilience.

Applying transpersonal psycho-synthesis to managing business demands serves as a rational and intuitive scan—that is, to rationally and intuitively perceive internal and external environmental changes and/or demands as possible opportunities and/or challenges—to generate corporate resilience.

Combining the rational and intuitive scan with productive workplace practices stimulates entrepreneurial behavior and creates conditions for corporate fantasy (ideation and resourcefulness), a key to organizational foresight.

Synthesizing the navigation system, the navigation instruments, the rational and intuitive scan, and the corporate fantasy instills the organizational confidence to exploit the market in a socially responsible manner. I call this process corporate alignment. Executing this alignment, however, can be inhibited by mental blocks or lack of inner freedom.

Exploiting the market in a socially responsible manner by delivering products and services and competitively matching consumer expectation with consumer experience must fulfill changing wants and serve the integrity of the marketplace. This concept is called profitable consumer trust.

The sleep-dream functions advocate eliminating overwork and job stress, which can cause (mental) health problems as well as suicides, to the benefit of gaining dedication, stimulating the optimal exchange of data and ideas, and establishing profitable mutual trust, both internally and externally. All of these combine to promote work-life synergy.

Chapter 5 interfaces proactive living (inside-out thinking) with reactive living (outside-in thinking) to overcome unconscious or mental blocks such as psychological biases, goal-fixation, and the effects of limiting potential growth due to the idea of death. This interface supports the third phase of self-actualization, and enables execution of everything that otherwise could possibly be inhibited by lack of inner freedom.

Projected onto managing business demands, this way of life combines the inside-out approach (emphasizes the strengths and weaknesses of the internal environment) with the outside-in approach (emphasizes the opportunities and threats of the external environment) to enable implementation of intuitive ideas, increasing productivity.

Having overcome inner conflicts, mistaken identities, and mental blocks (i.e., having gained inner or psychological freedom) enables businesses to execute corporate alignment in order to raise organizational confidence, lay the foundation for balancing soft and hard economic factors resiliently, and create work-life synergy, adding meaning and joy to our work, lives and society at large.

Chapter 6 recaps the strategic principles of self-actualization in order to benefit our inner growth, realizing our calling, and unfold the essence of our wholeness as spiritual psycho-synthesis, the fourth phase of self-actualization.

The links between our common faculties, our self-actualization trajectories, and business demands are highlighted to demystify the spiritual or holistic properties of life as down-to-earth holism or cosmic sympathy, which is also provided with some scientific ground.

In this process, spiritual psycho-synthesis is projected onto businesses, and translates to holistic execution of corporate alignment. This last phase necessitates innovation, i.e., profitably creating and meeting new market demands to beat the competition, reconciling this specific new strategy and the organizational shape to re-establish an environmental fit, ensure continuity, and advance work-life synergy.

The choice of strategy is based on the idea of holistically executing corporate alignment, and the nervous system of managing business demands is reduced to seven chakras, or energy centers, which allow a free flow of energy to put this idea into practice.

Chapter 7 exemplifies how civilization and commercialization disturb the realization of our psychological roadmap or psycho-synthesis, recaps how this can be restored, enabling the mysticism of resilience to emerge, and continues our psychological journey to unveil the guru within each of us: the penetralium of one’s self.

Chapter 8 presents an environmental survey to assist us in high-performance management by revealing which factors stimulate or disturb work-life synergy.