In this book, all personalities presented are asked how they would have dealt with the diesel scandal.
My chapter is about Mary Parker Follet. Mary Parker Follett was a pioneering thinker in management who emphasized as early as 1924 that true leadership consists of creating leaders. Her theories of power, leadership, and conflict resolution are still relevant to management practice today. Despite initial rejection due to her gender, she became a sought-after consultant and lecturer in the USA and England.
Mary Parker Follett would probably have regarded the VW diesel scandal as a failure to resolve the conflict. Instead of dealing with the conflicts between environmental regulations and technical options, VW chose the path of fraud in order to seemingly accommodate both parties. Follett would have emphasized that there is always a third solution that can satisfy both sides if you work on it together. She would also have criticized the power structures within the company, which hindered creative and legal solutions. Unfortunately, her consulting period did not fall in the era of VW, but she probably could have prevented the scandal.
When I was asked if I wanted to write an article for the classics section of ZOE, I was sceptical at first. The topic: Mary Parker Follett. My first thought? Sounds dry. A ‘classic’ of management theory, born in the 19th century - you wouldn't exactly expect ground-breaking impulses for today's world.But then I started reading. And couldn't stop.This woman was miles ahead of her time. She wrote about leadership without power, about shared responsibility, about participative decision-making processes - decades before terms such as agility or New Work even existed. She thought in terms of networks, not hierarchies. She was an advisor to several US presidents. And she spoke about collaboration and co-creation in a language that still seems more modern today than much of what is written in current business books.In short: I went from being a sceptic to a raving fan.
Apparently my article was well received. Because a little later, ZOE asked me if I wanted to be part of a new book project. It was about how the classic cars we portrayed would have reacted to the diesel scandal. It was immediately clear to me that if anyone would have had a clever, holistic perspective on this - it would have been Mary Parker Follett.So I asked myself: What would she say today? About responsibility. About leadership. About the interplay between the individual and the system. And that's exactly what I wrote down in my article.
