Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) was an American social worker, business consultant, and author of numerous books on democracy, creative experience, and management. She wrote about the power of the collective that arises from shared power – power with as distinct from power over. Follett grasped that a major impediment to thinking collectively about power is “the fear of subordination to others.”

Peter Drucker correctly named her the “prophet of management.” Warren Bennis called her a “swashbuckling advance scout of management thinking.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted that reading Follett was “like entering a real of calm in a sea of chaos. Her work reminds us…there are truths about human behavior that stand the test of time. They persist despite superficial changes, like the deep and still ocean beneath the waves of management fad and fashion.”

In The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly, the co-authors (Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, John Ott, and Tom Callanan) discuss three of her major insights.

“First was seeing the possibility of integration, a way in which key elements from both sides of a polarity could be discerned and addressed. For this to happen, power had to be shifted and structures of one-sided influence had to give way to circular ones based on relationship.” The objective is to locate shared ground and learn together from the transparency of data about the system.

“This led to her second insight, which involved what she called the ‘law of the situation.’ Instead of marshaling outside experts and facts to bolster one side over the other, Follett proposed using information to advance transparency of operations. She saw the power of the scientific method, still nascent in her day, as useful in creating a shared pool of data that everyone could access.”

“Finally was her insight about leadership itself. She understood that true leaders do not command obedience through force or manipulation but rather by giving expression to external realities and the interior aspirations of others.”

Here is a link to the Mary Parker Follett Foundation’s Web site: http://www.follettfoundation.org

You may also wish to check out Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management edited by Pauline Graham as well as the aforementioned The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly