Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Christopher Cox honored Alice Paul, the suffragist who picketed the White House without saying a word, was force-fed in prison at 60 pounds, and still rewrote the Constitution. Today Philip K. Howard pays tribute to Mary Parker Follett, the social thinker who understood the secret of group behavior—and why American democracy keeps getting it wrong. —The Editors
Mary Parker Follett was a seminal thinker in management theory. In the early days of large industrial organization, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was preaching the gospel of “scientific management,” Follett emphasized the social aspects of any group enterprise. Taylor was not wrong—improving efficiency remains an ongoing goal of successful manufacturers. But his efficient workplace could result in mind-numbing repetition. Follett understood that workers had human needs—for variety, for agency, for mutual understanding.
Follett originated the idea that, in the words of former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, “organizations perform best when they operate on the basis of shared responsibility and not . . . command and obedience.” Rigid organizational hierarchies, Follett argued, were counterproductive; the people on the spot should have the authority to adapt to “the law of the situation.” This, she saw, requires a system of “management with authority all down the line.” Follett understood that a “final authority” is always needed, but explained how better choices and better understanding resulted when “decisions are usually reached through a process” of interaction. The practice of exploring solutions and reconciling differences melds people into a common unit: “The strength of the group,” she wrote, “does not depend on the greatest number of strong men, but on the strength of the bond between them.” Healthy organizations have an “invisible leader—the common purpose.” (Unless otherwise noted, the quotes by and about Follett are from the 1995 book Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management.)
Follett (1868–1933) came to her understandings not through study but through life. Her father, a shoe-factory machinist in Quincy, Massachusetts, died when she was a teenager. With an ailing mother and a young brother, Follett was thrust into the role of head of the household. She taught school in Boston and could pursue her studies only intermittently, eventually graduating summa cum laude at age 30 from the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women—what we now call Radcliffe College. While teaching and studying she published her first book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896), which described how the speaker consolidates and wields power. In a laudatory review, Theodore Roosevelt called it a “really notable contribution to the study of the growth of American governmental institutions” and praised Follett for presenting “facts as they are.”
After graduation, Follett became a social worker, creating a network of community centers for vocational training in Boston. These hubs for self-improvement succeeded, Follett realized, when people felt a sense of ownership and a part of how the centers worked. Their success would inspire hundreds of other American cities to build similar programs.
