Mary Parker Follett: Her Time Has Come

Management as we know it has an origin story, and like most origin stories, it’s full of contrasts, blind spots, and unrealized potential. At the center of that story sit two contemporaries who could not have seen the world more differently: Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, and Mary Parker Follett, the brilliant philosopher of collaborative leadership.

Both were studying organizations in the early 1900s. Both saw inefficiency and human struggle in the workplace. Both wanted to improve how people worked.
But they wrote two wildly different codes for the “leadership operating system” that would shape the next century.

One Operating System won. The other was ahead of its time.

Now the world has flipped—and we’re discovering that the OS we never installed is the one we need most.

Two Management Operating Systems: A Century-Old Fork in the Road

Taylor’s Operating System spread across the world because it fit the industrial era—machines, assembly lines, predictable inputs, and predictable outputs. Follett’s Operating System was not ignored because she was wrong. It was ignored because she was early.

She was writing leadership theory before the world had enough complexity to need it.

Now we need it.

Why the Taylor Operating System Is Outdated

Taylor coded an OS optimized for:

  • Repeatable tasks

  • Clear right answers

  • Mechanical efficiency

  • Tight control

  • A world that changed slowly

That OS assumes that:

  • The leader knows the answer

  • The job is to direct people toward the answer

  • Variance is bad

  • Uncertainty is a flaw

  • People should follow orders

  • Thinking is centralized at the top

This made perfect sense in an economy built on factories and linear production.

But today?

The Taylor OS collapses under the weight of complexity.

  • AI is rewriting value chains.

  • Customers shift expectations overnight.

  • Social dynamics evolve faster than policies.

  • Teams face adaptive challenges that cannot be solved with known expertise.

The world has become too complex for a top-down OS.

The flaw isn’t moral—it’s mathematical. The information load is simply too high for any one person to process.

Audrey WyattComment