[MD] more girls please

[ian glendinning]

Gav, Rebecca, et al .. for your possible interest ...

I've been reading a compilation of the work of Mary Parker Follett
"The Prophet of Management". A non-management / non-industry
sociologist type who wrote her best stuff in the 1920's when western
industrial expansion was continuing to boom post-Victorian times, and
Management was trying to make itself more professional / scientific.

The compilation is by Pauline Graham (a 1990's CEO in the retail
business) with a preface by Rosabeth Kanter (management writer and
guru of 80's/90's). Follet's companion in life was Isobel Briggs, and
subsequently Mother and daugher team Katherine Briggs and Isobel
Briggs-Myers were responsible for the Myers-Briggs management toolset.

With me so far ? All women.

The book also has a biographical introduction by (recently deceased)
guru of management gurus Peter Drucker, who along with other (male)
management gurus of recent decades like Warren Bennis and Charles
Handy, consider that nothing written by anyone since Mary Parker
Follett has added much to what management is about.

She was reasonably famous in her time, consulting and speaking all
around the world on the strength of her writing. However between the
30's and the 80's she completely disappeared of the face of management
text references, until unearthed again by the researches of Drucker et
al.

Drucker opines why. The people she was writing her messages for - the
(male) "Captains of Industry" - did indeed see women as "Office or
Shop Girls", but they were not particularly prejudiced against her
work because she was a woman, but because her female ideas just did
not register as relevant to their male view of business and industry
and its management.

Interesting stuff I thought.

(Actually her work is full of "quality interactions and process"
allusions too. She had quality - in the management sense - licked long
before Sloan exported it to the Japanese with the help of Juran and
Deming.)

Ian