Mary Parker Follett, the “Mother of Modern Management”
Just about everything written today about leadership and organizations comes from Mary Parker Follett's writings and lectures.
— Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern California.
As Goalbook has grown (we are almost 40 full-time team members now!), I have encountered many challenges and limitations in my ability to lead and manage others. This has forced me to read and learn from others to develop my own leadership and well as build leadership and management capacity in others. I hope to share more of learnings on Medium as a way to reinforce my own understanding as well as hopefully share something valuable with others.
I came across this intriguing passage and footnote in John Doerr’s book on OKRs, Measure what Matters:
The early-twentieth-century forefathers of management theory, notably Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, were the first to measure output systematically and analyze how to get more of it. They held that the most efficient and profitable organization was authoritarian.*
*) A more progressive model, mostly ignored at the time, was advanced by a Massachusetts social worker named Mary Parker Follett. In her essay “The Giving of Orders” (1926), Follett proposed that power sharing and collaborative decision making between managers and employees led to better business solutions. Where Taylor and Ford saw hierarchy, Follett saw networks.
I was immediately intrigued by this thought leader who’s leadership and management ideas have outlasted the much more well known names of “Taylor” and “Ford” and did so as a woman in 1926! History is not my area of expertise, but with the current challenges women in business face today, I can’t really imagine what things might have been like in 1926.
… the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional of having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
I immediately bought the book, Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follet, which includes her essay The Giving of Orders. I’ve just started reading it, but am already find myself captivated by Follett’s writing as well as her wider life and career.

Who was Mary Parker Follett?
Her Wikipedia entry is a fascinating read. Here are just a few highlights from it:
- Began her career as a social worker in Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.
- Rejected from Harvard because she was a woman.
- First woman ever invited to address the London School of Economics.
- Advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt.
- Influenced new “matrix-style” of corporate organization which was adopted by DuPont.
- Coined the terms “win-win” and “transformational leadership.”
Follett’s Essays in Dynamic
Dynamic Administration contains 14 of her essays:
- Constructive Conflict
- The Giving of Orders
- Business as an Integrative Unity
- Power
- How must Business Management in order to possess the Essentials of a Profession
- How much Business Management develop in order to become a Profession
- The Meaning of Responsibility in Business Management
- The Influence of Employee Representation in a Remolding of the Accepted Type of Business Manager
- The Psychology of Control
- The Psychology of Consent and Participation
- The Psychology of Conciliation and Arbritration
- Leader and Expert
- Some Discrepancies in Leadership Theory and Practice
- Individualism in a Planned Society
What I already love about her work is that she writes about the fundamental principles of human-nature and human-values that inform her practical recommendations on business leadership and management. My hope is that I won’t just learn some useful tips and strategies, but will develop a deeper understanding of the essential truths of leading and managing others.
The most profound philosophers have always given us unifying as the fundamental principle of life. And now business men are finding it is the way to run a successful business. Here the ideal and the practical have joined hands. That is why I am working at business management, because, while I care for the ideal, it is only because I want to help bring it into our everyday affairs.
— Mary Parker Follett, Rowntree Lecture Conference at Oxford, 1926
This is the first post in what I hope will an ongoing series of learnings I have from Mary Parker Follett’s essays in her book, Dynamic Administration.
