"One of the most interesting things about business to me is that I find so many business men who are willing to try experiments. I should like to tell you about two evenings I spent last winter and the contrast between them. I went one evening to a drawing-room meeting where economists and M.Ps. talked of current affairs, of our present difficulties. It all seemed a little vague to me, did not seem really to come to grips with our problem. The next evening it happened that I went to a dinner of twenty business men who were discussing the question of centralization and decentralization. Each one had something to add from his own experience of the relation of branch firms to the central office, and the other problems included in the subject. There I found L hope for the future. There men were not theorizing or dogmatizing; they were thinking of what they had actually done and they were willing to try new ways the next morning, so to speak. Business, because it gives us the opportunity of trying new roads, of blazing new trails, because, in short, it is pioneer work, pioneer work in the organized relations of human beings, seems to me to offer as thrilling an experience as going into a new country and building railroads over new mountains. For whatever problems we solve in business management may help towards the solution of world problems, since the principles of organization and administration which are discovered as best for business can be applied to government or international relations. Indeed, the solution of world problems must eventually be built up from all the little bits of experience wherever people are consciously trying to solve problems of relation. And this attempt is being made more consciously and deliberately in industry than anywhere else."
React to this quote
More by Mary Parker Follett
See allResonant Thoughts
"If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange misunderstanding on the basis of which books were written. We w…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"I've been asked from time to time, "How does it happen that you have made so many discoveries? Are you smar…"
— Linus Pauling"No new choices are introduced by raising the specter of disaster. These become opportunities for swearing n…"
— Donald Phillip Verene"He was always imprisoned by his conscience, yet he did make compromises for public consumption."
— V. P. Singh"In physics, the thinker Kanada, explained light and heat as different aspects of the same element, thus ant…"
— Kanada (philosopher)"If dust tries to get together, as it increases in density it increases the temperature, which increases the…"
— Kent Hovind"...among no people of the pre-Christian era do we find so great a number of intellectually prominent men wh…"
— Michael von Faulhaber
