Mary Parker Follett Quotes
Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, not absorbed.
That is always our problem, not how to get control of people, but how all together we can get control of a situation.
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.
the best leaders try to train their followers themselves to become leaders. ... they wish to be leaders of leaders.
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.
Coercive power is the curse of the universe, coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.
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.
We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature.
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.
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.
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.
Imitation is for shirkers, like-minded-ness for the comfort lovers, unifying for the creators.
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.
Experience may be hard but we claim its gifts because they are real, even though our feet bleed on its stones.
Most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia.
While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others.
we should think not only of what the leader does to the group, but also of what the group does to the leader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Power-over is resorted to time without number because people will not wait for the slower process of education.
The insight to see possible new paths, the courage to try them, the judgment to measure results - these are the qualities of a leader.
The divorce of our so-called spiritual life from our daily activities is a fatal dualism.
Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader-the common purpose.
there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.
We are sometime truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition.
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.
It is of equal importance with the discovery of facts to know what to do with them.
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.
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 manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman, but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.
we certainly do not want to abolish power, that would be abolishing life itself, but we need a new orientation toward it.
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.
In the small group then is where we shall find the inner meaning of democracy, its very heart and core.
Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.
The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of their citizens.
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.
