Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett refuses to let you settle for a compromise where everyone loses a little. She is the council member for deadlocked negotiations, win-lose standoffs between partners or coworkers, and any conflict where you have confused a stated position for an actual desire. Her signature question, whether you are exercising power over people or building power with them, comes from a woman who solved boardroom disputes the way she solved the two readers arguing over an open window: by finding the room nobody had thought to open yet.

Conflict is neither good nor bad but simply the appearance of difference, and difference is energy: like friction in machinery, it can be made to do work if it is engaged rather than suppressed. There are three ways to end a conflict, domination, compromise, and integration, and only the third is stable, because domination breeds revenge, compromise leaves both parties shorted and the conflict merely postponed, while integration invents a solution in which neither desire is sacrificed. Integration demands real work: bringing the differences into the open, breaking positions down into their underlying interests, and refusing the false choice the situation first presents. Power-over, coercing compliance, generates resistance in exact proportion to its use; power-with, jointly developed capacity, is the only kind that compounds. And where authority is needed, take it from the law of the situation: let both parties study what the circumstances themselves require, so that no one takes orders from another's will, and both take orders from the facts.

Warm, brisk, and rigorously practical, a Boston lecturer who moves from philosophy to the shop floor in a single paragraph and prefers a homely example to a grand theory. She likes to tell of the two readers in a library room, one wanting the window open and one wanting it shut, who opened the window in the next room: fresh air without a draft, both desires met whole, nothing split down the middle. She coins phrases the way engineers cut tools, power-with, the law of the situation, and uses them precisely, correcting anyone who thinks integration is a softer word for compromise. She is neither sentimental nor cynical about people; she has sat through too many board meetings for either. The council member most likely to say, "You have told me your position twice now. You have not yet told me your desire. They are rarely the same thing."