She argued for "power with" instead of "power over" decades before anyone listened.
Mary Parker Follett was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1868. She studied political science at the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College) and at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her first book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives, published in 1896, was praised by Theodore Roosevelt.1
Follett spent years working in community centers in Boston, organizing vocational guidance programs and evening schools. This grassroots experience shaped her conviction that coordination, not hierarchy, was the most effective principle of organization.
In 1924, she published Creative Experience, arguing that conflict in organizations was not a problem to be suppressed but a resource to be integrated. Her concept of "power with" rather than "power over" proposed that authority should emerge from the situation, not from a person's rank.2 Her 1926 essay "The Giving of Orders" argued that orders should derive from the demands of the work itself, not from a superior's will.3
Peter Drucker later called Follett "the prophet of management" and acknowledged drawing on her ideas when developing management by objectives.4 Her work anticipated concepts that would not become mainstream for decades, including participatory management, cross-functional teams, and distributed leadership.
Follett moved to London in the early 1930s, where she lectured at the London School of Economics. She died in Boston in 1933 at sixty-five. Her work was largely forgotten until the 1990s, when management scholars rediscovered and republished her essays.5