Mary Parker Follett: Her Ideas Still Matter

The purpose of leadership is not to direct people, but to create the conditions under which people can discover and exercise their collective power… to paraphrase her work.

Mary Parket Follet seems to become more relevant with every passing decade.

She wrote in the early twentieth century, yet many of the ideas people celebrate today (systems thinking, collaboration, collective intelligence, network leadership, community engagement, and participatory decision-making) can be found in her work long before they became fashionable.

In her work, she clearly understood something many people still struggle to grasp: people are not problems to be managed. Communities are not machines to be controlled. Human beings exist within living systems of relationships.

That insight inspires much of my own work.