Mary Parker Follett
I am convinced that any feeling of exaltation because we have people under us should be conquered, for I am sure that if we enjoy being over people, there will be something in our manner which will make them dislike being under us.Collection: Leadership
... good intentions are not sufficient to solve our problems.Collection: Good Intentions
Another idea that is changing is that the leader must be one who can make quick decisions. The leader to-day is often one who thinks out his decisions very slowly.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Thinking
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.Collection: Peace
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.Collection: Women
The manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman, but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.Collection: Opportunity
a little of the ready reliance on the expert comes from the desire to waive responsibillity, comes from the endless evasion of life instead of an honest facing of it. The expert is to many what the priest is, someone who knows absolutely and can tell us what to do. The king, the priest, the expert, have one after the other had our allegiance, but so far as we put any of them in the place of ourselves, we have not a sound society and neither individual nor general progress.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Leadership
The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them, they have a vision of the future.Collection: Leadership
We are sometime truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition.Collection: Entrepreneur
we certainly do not want to abolish power, that would be abolishing life itself, but we need a new orientation toward it.Collection: Power
there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.Collection: People
... orders come from the work, not work from the orders.Collection: Order
Power-over is resorted to time without number because people will not wait for the slower process of education.Collection: Power
It is of equal importance with the discovery of facts to know what to do with them.Collection: Discovery
Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Business
It is always the sign of the second-rate man when the decision merely meets the present situation. It is the left-over in a decision which gives it its greatest value. It is the carry-over in the decision which helps develop the situation in the way we wish it to be developed. The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them; they have a vision of the future.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Leadership
Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.Collection: Agreement
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.Collection: Attitude
many rules could be made for the giving of orders. Don't preach when you give orders. Don't discuss matters already settled unless you have fresh data. Make your direction so specific that there will be no question whether they have been obeyed or not. Find out how to give directions and yet to allow people opportunity for independent thinking, for initiative. And so on and so on. Order-giving requires just as much study and just as much training as any other skill we wish to acquire.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Leadership
The foreman today does not merely deal with trouble, he forestalls trouble. In fact, we don't think much of a foreman who is always dealing with trouble; we feel that if he is doing his job properly, there won't be so much trouble.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Business
Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Leadership
I am free when I am functioning here in time and space as the creative will. ... freedom by our definition is obedience to the law of one's nature.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Nice
A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.Collection: Majority Rule
administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!Collection: Purpose
The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.Collection: Women