Riding the biggest wave: Entrepreneur Andrew Kay is betting that his brand of humanistic management will ensure Kaypro's survival in the turbulent PC waters

During the summer of 1962, psychologist Abraham Maslow was “a son of Visiting Fellow” at a small Del Mar., Calif., manufacturer of digital instruments then called Non-Linear Systems Inc. (NLS) and in 1983 renamed the Kaypro Corp. Maslow, who is known for his psychological “hierarchy of needs,” and Kaypro's feisty founder and president, Andrew F. Kay, talked often about the principles of “humanistic management” that Kay practiced and that Maslow pondered in a journal later published as Eupsychian Management. Kay remembers Maslow's parting words were that he believed those humanistic management principles would hold when a company was prospering but he wasn't so sure they would work “in stormy weather.”