In the summer of 1962 Abraham Maslow was driving through heavy fog on the treacherous Big Sur coastal highway in California. Noticing an interesting sign, he decided to pull over. The place he had stumbled upon turned out to be the world's first personal growth centre, Esalen, where, serendipitously, staff inside were unpacking copies of his latest book, Towards A Psychology of Being.

With such a beginning, it was perhaps inevitable that Maslow would become the high priest of the 1960s human potential movement. Through the core idea of the 'self-actualising person', his Motivation and Personality had presented a new image of human nature which excited a whole generation.

Yet Maslow was not an obvious revolutionary. As an academic psychologist his work was essentially a reaction against behaviourism, which broke people down to mechanistic parts, and Freudian psychoanalysis, which imagined us controlled by subterranean urges. Still working within the boundaries of the scientific method, Motivation and Personality instead sought to form a holistic view of people, one not dissimilar to how artists and poets have always imagined us. Rather than being simply the sum of our needs and impulses, Maslow saw us as whole people with limitless room for growth. It was this clear belief in human possibility and the organisations and cultures we could build that has made his work so influential.

Self-actualising people have attained '...the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities and the like'. These are the people who are a success as a person , aside from any obvious external success; by no means perfect, but seemingly without major flaws. Since Daniel Goleman wrote his bestseller on emotional intelligence, people have 'discovered' it as being a key to success, yet for self-actualised people this type of intelligence is ingrained.

Maslow's research involved the study of seven contemporaries and nine historical figures: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson, Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley and Spinoza. He identified 19 characteristics of the self-actualised person, including clarity of perception, problem-centred, solitude seeking, humble and respectful, ethical, resistance to enculturation, and sense of humour.

At the time he wrote Motivation and Personality, Maslow believed that only a tiny percentage of the population was self-actualised, but that these few could change the whole culture. Given the impact of the idea on the 1960s counter-culturalists, a generation that has changed the world in its image, you would have to say Maslow was right.

Certainly, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been seminal to understanding motivation in the workplace, and the self-actualisation of the employee has become a serious concern in business. He foresaw the trend towards personal growth and excitement replacing money as the highest motivator in a person's working life.