Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett

Follett was a contemporary of Taylor and argued against almost everything he stood for. Where Taylor saw management as control through measurement, Follett saw it as coordination through relationship — power with, not power over. She described organisations as living processes rather than static hierarchies, anticipated systems thinking by decades, and insisted that conflict was a resource to be integrated rather than a problem to be eliminated. Her ideas were largely ignored during her lifetime and rediscovered in the 1990s, by which time much of what she said had been independently reinvented under new labels. For anyone interested in how product teams actually function — through negotiation, emergence, and distributed authority — Follett is the origin point.