International Women's Day 2026

Time for a change in politics and management

- Based on Mary P. Follett's groundbreaking ideas on democratic development and modern management

Mary Follett, the influential democracy researcher and, for many experts, the most important management thought leader, gave a speech in 1926, exactly 100 years ago, on the topic of ‘Some methods of executive efficiency’, which remains relevant today. Anyone reading this text today might think it had just been written

Who was this pioneer and why does she remain relevant today?

Suppose your boss made the following suggestion: from now on, you will help determine her salary in consultation with your team. If conflicts arise within the team, even on other issues, your boss will not dominate the proceedings. For her, it is not a matter of finding hasty compromises, but of bringing all the diverse arguments to the table and finding a solution that attempts to integrate all positions. Your boss likes people, joint projects and loves diverse personalities. She sees conflicts as an opportunity to make the organisation fit for the future and wants to convince you to understand joint performance as a continuous process. Your boss has probably read a lot about organisational development.

Your boss has probably read a lot about organisational development. Probably without knowing Mary Follett, who first developed and put many of these innovative management concepts on paper in collaboration with other executives. ‘We achieve unity only through diversity. Differences must be integrated, not eliminated, not absorbed.’

It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that Mary Follett (1868-1933) is one of the few people in recent history who is hardly known to anyone, but without whose thinking and models the modern social world can hardly be explained. Follett moved fearlessly between the separate spheres of society, advising the most important politicians of her time, such as President Franklin Roosevelt, as well as community activists in urban immigrant communities. With her groundbreaking ideas, she found an audience in the academic world, including Harvard, and among influential industrialists such as Chester Barnard and Benjamin Rowntree.

Follett already gave lectures at the first groundbreaking Rowntree conferences on modern management approaches. In ‘Some Methods of Increasing Executive Efficiency,’ she introduced the management topic of ‘coordination’ exactly one hundred years ago, in 1926. According to Follett, all organisations suffer from conflicts. In addition to the obvious conflicts between management and employees, there are also conflicts between different competing interests, different departments, teams and different ideas. One of the most important tasks of management is to see these conflicts as an opportunity and use them to achieve a common goal within the organisation.

Follett's original field of work, the analysis of the structures, processes and weaknesses of a still young democracy (her first book from 1896 entitled ‘The Speaker of the House of Representatives’), led her to continue her advisory work on the processes of organisation in parallel. She developed a language for decision-makers and remained connected with people who were beginning to experiment with leadership models and find fresh solutions for innovative and sustainable businesses.

Modern democracy and the century of organisations is a world that seems to have sprung from Mary Follett's think tank: further developing democracy, which is still young in human history; rethinking human working relationships in a post-hierarchical and post-heroic world; developing a lateral leadership model as leadership without direct authority; seeing conflicts as opportunities rather than problems; striving for win-win solutions, seeing leadership as a contingent process in which leaders and followers influence each other. Many of her other management innovations and concepts are now almost trivial and seem to be of little originality. But hardly anyone knows who they originated from.

The Mary Follett world is a world of thought that came into being in a most unlikely way. A visionary who could see something at the time that only a woman could have developed so prophetically. A woman who, almost from birth, had to assert herself in a world that had something completely different in store for her. Growing up in a pietistic environment with a father who died early and a mother who needed care, her chances of studying at Harvard and Oxford were practically zero at the time. It was even more unlikely that she would then choose the broad topic of democratic development, graduate with a degree in it, and subsequently discuss it with the President of the United States. And only the subsequent, highly improbable path she took over two decades as a cross-border commuter, learning to understand political and organisational processes as a whole in practical community work, made her life's work as a practical philosopher possible. Her legacy is that people like her can work to gain the freedom to go their own way. Mary Follett relied on herself and left an impressive mark.

We should not let her be forgotten.

Graduation photo 1898, summa cum laude, Radcliffe College (Harvard Annex) - college class 1898: together with Maud Wood/Boston Equal Suffrage Association and Gertrude Stein, among others.