Mary Parker Follett Prophet of Management

In this 1995 collection of Follet's writings (ISBN 0-87584-563-0), Pauline Graham does a great service by providing the public with the Prophet of Management's philosophy unvarnished. Concurrently, she gathers some of the top writers on management science, such Mintzberg and Drucker, to describe the significant, continuing implications of Follet's work. Follet was a well-educated Bostonian whose training and experiences formed her teachings. She was a social worker who helped the homeless, a political scientist who studied human response to conflict, and a highly-sought consultant who gave the world her ideas before it was ready for them

Along with Lillian Gilbreth, Mary Parker Follett was one of two great women management gurus in the early days of classical management theory. She admonished overmanaging employees, a process now known as micromanaging, as bossism and she is regarded by some writers as the mother of Scientific Management. As such she was one of the first women ever invited to address the London School of Economics, where she spoke on cutting-edge management issues. She also distinguished herself in the field of management by being sought out by President Theodore Roosevelt as his personal consultant on managing not-for-profit, non-governmental, and voluntary organizations. In her capacity as a management theorist, Mary Parker Follett pioneered the understanding oflateral processes within hierarchical organizations which recognition led directly to the formation of matrix-style organizations, the first of which was DuPont, in the 1920s, the importance of informal processes within organizations, and the idea of the "authority of expertise"--which really served to modify the typology of authority developed by her German contemporary, Max Weber, who broke authority down into three separate categories: rational-legal, traditional and charismatic.
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Her unique style of detailed interviews with subject-matter-experts coupled with a straightforward articulation of complex ideas allowed her to reach wide audiences with great effect. Contemporary scholars are now just rediscovering her, and may they continue to do so! Modern management theory owes a lot to a nearly-forgotten woman writer, Mary Parker Follett.

KEY POINTS: - Her key interest was in "reinventing the citizen" (7). - Her most profound psychological observation on human behavior: "we react ot only to the other party but also to the relationship that exists between us, thus creating in part our own response" (ix). Her concept of circular response expounds on this: "...my behaviour helps create the situation to which I am responding" (85). - A leader "is one who sees the whole situation, organizes the experience of the group, offers a vision of the future, and trains followers to be leaders" (xiv). - True power comes from relationships and the respect that engenders. "The most effective way to exercise authority is to

depersonalize the giving of orders, emphasizing the importance of a task rather than the rights one person has over another" (xiv). In this sense, function is a key area of focus in a successful business. - Business is a social institution (xiv). In this context, management is a function or process, not a set of tools to influence subordinates (xiii). Follet also takes the idea further by saying that "a person's work itself becomes community service" (xv). - This integrated lifestyle would also describe her conflict resolution technique whereby individuals or organizations would ideally not seek domination or compromise. Rather, they would create alternatives (i.e., not either-or (see p. 70)) to satisfy each other's true needs. The catch is for both sides to listen to each other in order to discern those requirements and achieve an "integration of interests" (4). "The first rule, then, for obtaining integration is to put your cards on the table, face the real issue, uncover the conflict, bring the whole thing into the open" (75). She concludes that conflict is difference (67). - In bureaucracy, Follet was ahead of her time. She "urged leaders to replace bureaucracy with empowered group networks with a common purpose" (xv). She also urged healthy businesses to encourage employees to think about their responsibilities (products) rather than about to whom they report (147). This would presage Senge's learning organizations and foster business management as a holistic, inter-disciplinary effort. - Follet saw "democratic governance" (15) as a means for an individual to constructively & responsibly contribute to an organized society. Every worker, then, becomes a valuable asset because they have knowledge and experience which are crucial to accomplishing specific tasks (157). Leadership connects the control of the situation to the citizen. "When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power" (169). - "For whatever problems we solve in business management may help toward the solution of world problems, since the principles of organisation and administration which are discovered as best for business can be applied to government or international relations" (139). About mary parker follet :In 1898, Mary Parker Follett graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe. Her research at Radcliffe was published in 1896 and again in 1909 as The Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mary Parker Follett began working in Roxbury as a voluntary social worker in 1900. In 1908 she became chair of the Women's Municipal League Committee on Extended Use of School Buildings. In 1911, she and others opened the East Boston High School Social Center. She also helped found other social centers in Boston. In 1917, Mary Parker Follett took on the vice-presidency of the National Community Center Association, and in 1918 published her book on community, democracy, and government,The New State. Mary Parker Follett published another book, Creative Experience, in 1924, with more of her ideas about the creative interaction of people in group process. In 1926, she moved to England to live and work, and to study at Oxford. In 1928, Follett consulted with the League of Nations and with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. She lived in London from 1929 with Dame Katharine Furse of the Red Cross. In her later years, Mary Parker Follett became a popular writer and lecturer in the business world. She was a lecturer at the London School of Economics from 1933.

Mary Parker Follett advocated for a human relations emphasis equal to a mechanical or operational emphasis in management. Her work contrasted with the "scientific management" of Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) and evolved by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, which stressed time and motion studies. Mary Parker Follett stressed the interactions of management and workers. She looks at management and leadership holistically, presaging modern systems approaches; she identifies a leader as "someone who sees the whole rather than the particular." Follett was one of the first (and for a long time, one of the few) to integrate the idea of organizational conflict into management theory, and is sometimes considered the "mother of conflict resolution." In a 1924 essay, "Power," she coined the words "power-over" and "power-with" to differentiate coercive power from participative decision-making, showing how "power-with" can be greater than "power-over." "Do we not see now," she observed, "that while there are many ways of gaining an external, an arbitrary power - through brute strength, through manipulation, through diplomacy - genuine power is always that which inheres in the situation?"

Mary Parker Follett died in 1933 on a visit to Boston. After her death, her papers and speeches were compiled and published in 1942 in Dynamic Administration, and in 1995, Pauline Graham edited a compilation of her writing in Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management. The New State was reissued in a new edition in 1998 with helpful additional material.

Her work was mostly forgotten in America, and is still largely neglected in studies of the evolution of management theory, despite the accolades of more recent thinkers like Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker called her the "prophet of management" and his "guru."

Mary Parker Follett believed that people work best as members of a group and that there should not be a formal authoritative leader but that leader should be people best suited to the job because of their greater knowledge and expertise. The main points of Mary Parker Follett are: 1.Management is a continuous process - not static one. 2.Management has to involve the workers in the decision process. Follett was the first author writing about handling conflicts. Her approach was that one shouldlook for compromises. As an example she took her conflict with a fellow researcher in the Havardlibrary. The other person in the room wanted the window open, while Follett wanted it closed.After discussion the compromise was: they opened the window in the next room and left the dooropen, so, the other worker had fresh air and Follett no problems with the cold draft on her back.

Over the next three decades, however, she published many works, including: The Speaker of the House of Representatives 1896

The New State 1918 Creative Experience 1924 Dynamic Administration 1942 this collection of speeches and short articles was published posthumously

Even though most of Mary Parker Follett's writings remained known in very limited circles until republished at the beginning of this decade beginning with Pauline C. Graham's first-rate work, her ideas gained great influence after Chester Barnard, a New Jersey Bell exec and advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, published his seminal treatment of executive management, The Functions of the Executive. Barnard's work, which stressed the critical role of "soft" factors such as "communication" and "informal processes" in organizations, owed a telling yet undisclosed debt to Follett's thought and writings. In addition, her emphasis on such soft factors paralleled the work of Elton Mayo at Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant, and presaged the rise of the Human Relations Movement, as developed through the work of such figures as Abraham Maslow, Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, Dick Beckhard and other breakthrough contributors to the field of Organizational Development or "OD". Her influence can also be seen indirectly perhaps in the work of Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, Lee Bradford, Edie Seashore and others at the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, New Hampshire, where T-Group methodology was first theorized and developed. Thus, Mary Follett's work set the stage for a generation of effective, progressive changes in management philosophy, style and practice, revolutionizing and humanizing the American workplace, and allowing the fulfillment of Douglas McGregor's management vision - quantum leaps in productivity effected through the humanization of the workplace.

"Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett: Early Sociology ofManagement and Organizations", Vol. 3, by Mary Follett, L. Urwick Editor; Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc. November 2003. ISBN 9780415279857

"Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management", by Pauline Graham Editor; Beard Books, Incorporated: December 2003. ISBN 9781587982132 Montana, P. J., & Charnov, B. H. 2008. Management. New York: Barrons, p. 18. ISBN 978-0-7641-3931-4

From this point until her death in 1933, Follett made a mark on the emerging discipline of management. Decision Process Workers should involve in the decision process because: Co-ordination is best achieved when the people responsible for making decisions are in direct contact. Co-ordination during the early planning stages is essential Co-ordination should address all factors in a situation. People closest to the action will make the best decision.