It is a mistake to think that social progress is to depend upon anything happening to the working people: some say that they are to be given more mat… - Mary Parker Follett

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.

As the psychic coherence of the group can be obtained only by the full contribution of every member, so we see that a readiness to compromise must be no part of the individual's attitude. Just so far as people think that the basis of working together is compromise or concession, just so far they do not understand the first principles of working together.

Since I have been in England I have been asked several times why I am studying business management. I will try to tell you. Free to choose between different paths of study, I have chosen this for a number of reasons. First of all, it is among businessmen (not all, but a few) that I find the greatest vitality of thinking to-day, and I like to do my thinking where it is most alive. I said last winter to a Professor of Philosophy: 'Do you realize that you philosophers have got to look to your laurels, that businessmen are doing some very valuable thinking and may get ahead of you?' And he acknowledged this, which I think was a very significant concession. Moreover, I find the thinking of businessmen to-day in line with the deepest and best thinking we have ever had. The last word in science—in biology—is the principle of unifying. The most profound philosophers have always given us unifying as the fundamental principle of life. And now business men are finding it is the way to run a successful business. Here the ideal and the practical have joined hands. That is why I am working at business management, because, while I care for the ideal, it is only because I want to help bring it into our everyday affairs.