Mary Parker Follett - Creative experience (1924)

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There is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.

Mary Parker Follett
It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily a wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities, but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned.

Mary Parker Follett
Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.

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

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

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
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
It is of equal importance with the discovery of facts to know what to do with them.

Mary Parker Follett
What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of the utmost importance that these should not be considered the same.

Mary Parker Follett
Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life.

Mary Parker Follett
The divorce of our so-called spiritual life from our daily activities is a fatal dualism.

Mary Parker Follett
The conflict of chemistry we do not think reprehensible. If we could look at social conflict as neither good nor bad, but simply a fact, we should make great strides in our thinking.

Mary Parker Follett
We can never catch up with life... we shall always be eating the soft part of our melting ice and meanwhile the nice hard part is rapidly melting too.

Mary Parker Follett
Administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!

Mary Parker Follett
Power-over is resorted to time without number because people will not wait for the slower process of education.

Mary Parker Follett
In the small group then is where we shall find the inner meaning of democracy, its very heart and core.

Mary Parker Follett