Quotes from 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.

The manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman, but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.

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

The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.

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

There is no such thing as vicarious experience.

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

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.

Responsiblity is the great developer of men.

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.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

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.

... orders come from the work, not work from the orders.

Management is the art of getting things done through people.

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

Unity not uniformity must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated not annihilated not absorbed.

No experience can ever be repeated, and in this fact we find all the tragedy of life and at the same time its glory—its irrepressible movement.

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.

We may be heartened by our sojourns on Sinai, but no man may live his life in the clouds. And what does pragmatism mean if not just this? We can only, as James told us again and again, understand the collective and distributive by living. Life is the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own being.

Life is the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own being.

the essence of experience, the law of relation, is reciprocal freeing: here is "the rock and the substance of the human spirit.