When Webb Met Follett: Negotiation Theory and the Race to the Moon

What is it about?

With the advent of the internet, Mary Parker Follett (1868 - 1933), an American known primarily as a management consultant, has begun to get an international audience. At a small conference in 2011 with attendees from five countries, held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and called The Mary Parker Follett Conversation, the members present all seemed to find out about Follett because they needed her approach. She was continuously expanding her own point of view based upon personal experiences and felt personal experience vital. She believed, "Experience may be hard, but we claim its gifts because they were real, even if our feet bleed on its stones." Of conflict, "As conflict--difference--is here in the world, as we cannot avoid ti, we should, I think, use it. . . . The friction between the driving wheel of the locomotive and the track is necessary to haul the train. . . The music of the violin we get by friction. . . . All polishing is done by friction." (This is from a January, 1925 conference before a Bureau of Personnel Administration.) I first "met" Follett in 1989 at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was amazed. Within a month, at the request of Jeff Rubin, editor, I had an article ready for publication in The Negotiation Journal. Because her ideas were so clearly expressed, I decided to structure the article as an interview, "An Interview with Mary Parker Follett." That led Fran Cooper, on the West Coast, San Francisco Bay Area, who had completed her PhD thesis on Follett ten years earlier, to contact me, and, in short order, send me all of her background materials. Included among her gems, was a letter from a James E. Webb, an attorney in Washington DC, in which he confirms Fran's comment that he indeed felt Follett had a profound effect on all that he did at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Also he sent her a 1971 copy of a talk he gave to the General Accounting Office where he explained her impact." James E. Webb was the Administrator of NASA, chosen by President John F. Kennedy, during the period that the USA geared up to put a man on the Moon and bring him home safely. (early 1961 - late 1968.) I knew these papers were important, but they were lost in a move from Boston to Mid-coast Maine in 1995. When I made a move back to Boston, some 25 years later, I found the documents in the attic. I knew it was time to explore this connection. This article, "When Webb Met Follett: Negotiation Theory and the Race to the Moon," is but the beginning for sharing information about Follett's impact on the USA's Race to the Moon.

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Why is it important?

One of Follett's thoughts seems particularly meaningful as I am writing this in 2017. (This quote is from her 1918 book, The New State. When she uses the word "state" she means a nation. The book was written during World War I. Her thought appears in the Introduction on page 11.) "No state can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew."

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