PERSON
Mary Parker Follett
The management theorist who, writing in the 1920s, distinguished coercive power from developmental power, compromise from integration, and command from the law of the situation—and whose framework for organizational intelligence in conditions of genuine conflict anticipates, with uncanny precision, everything the AI transition demands of institutions and teams.
Mary Parker Follett is the organizational theorist who arrived a century early. Writing for audiences of industrialists and factory managers in the 1920s and early 1930s, she articulated a framework for human organization so far ahead of her moment that it was absorbed into management theory in fragments, misread as idealism, and largely forgotten—only to resurface, urgently relevant, in every era that finds itself genuinely reckoning with questions of collective intelligence, distributed authority, and the creative potential of conflict. The AI transition is exactly such an era, and Follett’s framework is the one it needs. Her foundational distinction between
power-over and power-with—between the coercive power that commands compliance and the developmental power that grows through genuine collaboration—maps precisely onto the choice every organization now faces about how to deploy AI: as a mechanism for concentrating capability in fewer hands, or as an amplifier that increases the