Mary Parker Follett: The Roxbury Social Worker Who Pioneered Win-Win

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Mary Parker Follett was born in 1868 in Quincy, Massachusetts, to a working-class family; her father was a machinist at a shoe factory. After he died and her mother became seriously ill and disabled, Follett became head of the household as a teenager. She attended Thayer Academy, studied through the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, spent a year at Cambridge University, and took classes irregularly for six years at the Harvard Annex, later Radcliffe College, graduating summa cum laude in 1898. Her 1896 study of the Speaker of the House of Representatives drew praise from Theodore Roosevelt as the best work on the subject.

From 1900 to 1908 she worked as a social worker in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, opening public schools after hours as community centers and observing group behavior. Her 1918 book The New State argued that individuals and communities continually shape each other, and Creative Experience followed in 1924. Addressing business leaders, including at the London School of Economics, she challenged Taylorism, rejected compromise in favor of integration, set power with against power over, and proposed the authority of expertise. She died in Boston in 1933, and her ideas were later absorbed by others with little credit.

• Her ideas on lateral communication inspired early matrix-style organizations such as DuPont in the 1920s.
• She used concepts tied to transformational leadership as early as 1927.
• She shared her life with Isobel L. Briggs for more than 30 years and later grew close to Dame Katharine Furse.
• Japanese business leaders revived her ideas in the 1960s, and the episode links them to quality circles.
• The episode says Chester Barnard's 1938 book drew heavily on her concepts without acknowledging the debt.