Best 75 quotes of Mary Parker Follett on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

All polishing is done by friction.

And the most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which belong in his present picture but which are not yet there.

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.

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.

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

Concepts can never be presented to me merely, they must be knitted into the structure of my being, and this can only be done through my own activity.

Conflict is resolved not through compromise, but through invention.

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

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.

Democracy is self-creating coherence.

Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal.

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

Fear of difference is fear of life itself.

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.

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.

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.

Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

I do not think that we have psychological and ethical and economic problems. We have human problems, with psychological, ethical and economical aspects, and as many others as you like.

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.

Imitation is for shirkers, like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators.

In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice but not the single note; that is the secret of the group.

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

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.

It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader - the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader.

Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.

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.

Management is the art of getting things done through people.

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.

Most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia.

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.

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.

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.

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

That is always our problem, not how to get control of people, but how all together we can get control of a situation.

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.

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.

the best leaders try to train their followers themselves to become leaders. ... they wish to be leaders of leaders.

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.

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

The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.