Mary Parker Follett Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

We certainly do not want to abolish power, that would be abolishing life itself, but we need a new orientation toward it.

Mary Parker Follett
When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power. And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power.

Mary Parker Follett
Power is not a pre-existing thing which can be handed out to someone, or wrenched from someone. We have seen again and again the failure of "power" conferred. You could give me dozens of cases. The division of power is not the thing to be considered, but the method of organization which will generate power.

Mary Parker Follett
Now that we are recognizing more fully the value of the individual, now that management is defining more exactly the function of each, many are coming to regard the leader as the man who can energize his group, who knows how to encourage initiative, how to draw from all what each has to give.

Mary Parker Follett
Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals...the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.

Mary Parker Follett
We often tend to think that the executive wishes to maintain standard, wishes to reach a certain quality of production, and that the worker has to be goaded in some way to do this. Again and again we forget that the worker is often, usually I think, equally interested, that his greatest pleasure in his work comes from the satisfaction of worthwhile accomplishment, of having done the best of which he was capable.

Mary Parker Follett
There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments.... To find the significant rather than the dramatic features of industrial controversy, of a disagreement in regard to policy on board of directors or between managers, is essential to integrative business policies.

Mary Parker Follett
Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but Few have made me want to do something..

Mary Parker Follett
We are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations... Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within nations.

Mary Parker Follett
Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader-the common purpose.

Mary Parker Follett
If you wish to train yourself for higher executive positions, the first thing for you to decide is what you are training for. Ability to dominate or manipulate others? That ought to be easy enough, since most of the magazines advertise sure ways of developing something they call 'personality.' But I am convinced that the first essential of business success is the capacity for organized thinking.

Mary Parker Follett
We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or. There is often the possibility of something better than either of these two alternatives.

Mary Parker Follett
We can never wholly separate the human from the mechanical side... But you all see every day that the study of human relations in business and the study of operating are bound up together.

Mary Parker Follett
Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.

Mary Parker Follett
We should think not only of what the leader does to the group, but also of what the group does to the leader.

Mary Parker Follett
Experience may be hard but we claim its gifts because they are real, even though our feet bleed on its stones.

Mary Parker Follett
An order then should always be given not as a personal matter, not because the man giving it wants the thing done, but because it is the demand of the situation. And an order of this kind carries weight because it is the demand of the situation.

Mary Parker Follett
While the executive should give every possible value to the information of the specialist, no executive should abdicate thinking on any subject because of the expert. The expert's information or opinion should not be allowed automatically to become a decision. On the other hand, full recognition should be given to the part the expert plays in decision making.

Mary Parker Follett
We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature.

Mary Parker Follett
We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies.

Mary Parker Follett
It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power.

Mary Parker Follett
Good intentions are not sufficient to solve our problems.

Mary Parker Follett
There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

Mary Parker Follett
One of the greatest values of controversy is its revealing nature. The real issues at stake come into the open and have the possibility of being reconciled.

Mary Parker Follett
Part of the task of the leader is to make others participate in his leadership. The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power.

Mary Parker Follett
The method of moral hygiene as of physical hygiene is social cooperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom of Heaven one by one.

Mary Parker Follett
Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole — such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life — the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement.

Mary Parker Follett
Orders come from the work, not work from the orders.

Mary Parker Follett
The best leader does not ask people to serve him, but the common end. The best leader has not followers, but men and women working with him.

Mary Parker Follett
I wish we could understand the word expert as expressing an attitude of mind which we can all acquire rather than the collecting of information by a special caste.... Many of us are calling for experts because, acutely conscious of the mess we are in, we want someone to pull us out.

Mary Parker Follett