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

In the summer of 1989, not long after my article, “An Interview with Mary Parker Follett,” appeared in the Negotiation Journal (Davis 1989b), a bulky package arrived from a reader named Frances Cooper. Cooper, whose doctoral thesis was about Follett (Cooper 1981), sent me all her research, including two documents I found intriguing.

The first was a 1979 letter to Cooper from James E. Webb, an attorney in Washington, DC, who wrote that Follett's “influence was, indeed, profound in all that I did … in NASA” (Webb 1979). Webb, who died in 1992, directed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1961 to 1968, the period when the United States geared up to put a man on the moon. The second document was the transcript from a 1971 lecture Webb gave during an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. General Accounting Office (Webb 1971). In this talk, he singled out Follett as the primary influence upon his management approach, and explained why.

Webb's two documents were worth saving, which I did. But it was not until twenty‐five years later that I found them in my attic. They were still intriguing. While my interest in Follett had grown over the years, I had not explored the NASA connection. The time seemed ripe to find out more about Webb. How did he discover Follett? What drew him to her ideas? How did he put her ideas to work at NASA? And, what happened? The topic is an expansive one. This article is a start.¹

Given the scope and scale of his new job, Webb's choice of Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) is, in some ways, surprising because so few people knew of the connection, but it also makes sense. In every decade since the 1920s, Follett's ideas have been rediscovered in various ways: as “a challenge to the atmosphere of fatigued futility” during World War One (Lindeman 1924: ix); as “a gold mine of suggestion” (Urwick 1935: 163); “profound and fundamental” (Rowntree in Follett 1941: 8); “a proponent of creative democracy” (Harper and Dunham 1959: 224); “pioneering” in the field of interest‐based negotiations (Walton and McKersie 1965: 7); a “prophet before her time” (Shafritz and Whitbeck 1978: 3); “the underpinning of the collaborative ethic” (Taft 1987: 188); “a swashbuckling advance scout” of “management” (Bennis in Graham 1995: 177–178); a “genius” and “the mother of post‐scientific management” (Gabor 2000: 46); and finally as “one of the United States' foremost intellectuals about democracy and social organizations” (Marsh 2013: 1).

In the fields of labor relations, negotiation, and conflict resolution, Follett gained recognition early, in particular for her liberating ideas about discovering and integrating people's interests. Richard Walton and Robert McKersie's 1965 classic, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, put her on the map as a pioneer developing ideas foundational to the practice of interest‐based negotiation (Walton and McKersie 1965). Later, in Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury (1981) thanked “Mary Parker Follett for the story of two men quarreling in the library” (Fisher and Ury 1981: 41). Then, giving her story a slight twist, they used it to illustrate the concept of focusing on interests, not positions.

Follett's original story is worth reading because it introduces an important concept that remains forward‐looking even today: compromise has a downside because it hinders the creation of anything new (Follett 1941: 32). The story takes place in the Harvard Library, which she used while a student at Radcliffe College in the 1890s.

Follett believed “integration” was “the most suggestive word of contemporary psychology” (Follett 1924: 156). She recommended it as the primary process for capturing the creative potential of human differences. She offered her simple library story to illustrate integration in a talk on “constructive conflict,” first given to a group of business people in 1925 (Follett 1941).

She began by asking her audience to suspend their notions of conflict as being either good or bad. Then she offered a practical approach. “As conflict — difference — is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it, we should, I think, use it. Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us. Why not?” She explained how we “capitalize” on the power of friction using examples as diverse as the friction of the “driving wheel of the locomotive and the track” to “the music of the violin,” summarizing with “[a]ll polishing is done by friction.” She continued (1941: 31–32):

It is unlikely that Follett and Webb ever actually met. Henry Lambright, Webb's biographer, told me that Webb, who was enthusiastic about Follett, never spoke of such a meeting (Lambright 2014), and Follett died in 1933 when Webb was only twenty‐seven. Nevertheless, Webb clearly considered Follett his mentor — some of us find living mentors, others find wisdom in the words of people whose thinking is alive even if they are not, some do both.

Often, in the process of learning from a mentor, students become their mentor's interpreter and inevitably alter the teacher's original ideas as they integrate them into their own. Follett called this interaction circular response. “I never react to you,” she wrote, “but to you‐plus‐me; or to be more accurate, it is I‐plus‐you reacting to you‐plus‐me. ‘I’ can never influence ‘you’ because you have already influenced me; that is, in the very process of meeting, by the very process of meeting, we both become something different” (1924: 63–64).

Mary Parker Follett was born in 1868 in Quincy, Massachusetts, an industrial waterfront town just a short train ride from Boston, where she spent most of her adult life. Her father and his two brothers had served in the Union Army in America's Civil War. Although the war ended three years before her birth, the pain of that war remained fresh throughout her childhood, as she watched her father struggle with his drinking problem and the way he and his fellow Civil War veterans helped one another deal with what today we would call “post‐traumatic stress disorder” (Tonn 2003). She grew up with a deep admiration for President Abraham Lincoln, in particular his concept of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” (Lincoln 1863).

Follett was a talented student whose intelligence and willingness to take intellectual risks caught the attention of various teachers who nurtured her curiosity and academic discipline. She attended a newly formed college for women known as “The Harvard Annex” (because volunteer professors from Harvard taught the classes), which eventually became Radcliffe College.

After two years at the annex, she spent a year at Newnham College for Women in Cambridge, England. Admiring Follett's intellectual boldness, Melian Stawell, an Australian classmate at Newnham, later wrote that Mary's “keenest delight” was awakened by “the power of putting things through in spite of, no, that is too weak, because of difficulty and danger” (Stawell 1935: 44).

Follett then returned to the Boston area and divided her time between lecturing to students in a high school, continuing her classes at Radcliffe, and working on a thesis that was published in 1896 as The Speaker of the House of Representatives.³ In 1898, she received her bachelor of arts degree with high honors from Radcliffe (Tonn 2003).

After graduation, Follett went to work in Boston's neighborhoods, crowded with recent immigrants in need of housing, education, and jobs.⁴ She developed locally run neighborhood evening centers in public school buildings. Her strong belief that diverse groups of people can work together creatively by drawing upon their differences evolved from watching people grow their skills and confidence in Boston's evening centers. After almost twenty years, she wrote two books: The New State (1918) and Creative Experience (1924), based upon her evening center experiences as well as from other civic activities, such as serving on Boston's Wage Arbitration Board (Follett 1941; Graham 1995).

While developing vocational services, she befriended Henry Metcalf, a Tufts University professor, who urged her to give a series of talks at the Bureau of Personnel Administration (BPA), which he had recently formed “to provide employment management consulting services and continuing education programs to firms throughout the eastern United States” (Tonn 2003: 391). She eagerly prepared papers for the BPA on “Constructive Conflict,” “The Giving of Orders,” “Business as an Integrative Unity,” and “Power” (Follett 1941: 315). Metcalf printed and circulated her talks, building an audience (Tonn 2003: 393).

As word of her ideas spread, Metcalf invited her to present at three more annual series. Many who attended or read her talks asked her to consult on specific management issues they faced. Because Follett was so firmly grounded in practical ways to address difficult challenges, her audiences responded well when asked to strive for what Lincoln had called “the better angels of our nature,” or as she said in a talk about business ethics, “What then are we loyal to? To the soul of our work. To that which is both in our work and which transcends our work. This seems to me the highest romance …” (Follett 1941: 137).

British management consultant Lyndall Urwick wrote that after two minutes of talking with her, he found himself “at her feet, where I remained for the rest of her life” and described himself as “one of Follett's most ardent admirers” (Urwick 1963; Davis 1997: 12). He and Metcalf coedited Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett (Follett 1941). Referring to her as “a one‐woman” research team, Urwick described Follett's greatest gift (Follett 1977: xxxii):

James Webb was born in rural North Carolina in 1906. His was an intellectually inclined family, both parents instilling him with “a love of learning” (Lambright 1995: 11). His family, friends, and employers all noticed his innate organizational skills; whether it involved household chores, the family budget, or finally the federal budget, Webb excelled at troubleshooting, figuring out problems, and fixing them quickly. One college classmate reported Webb had a photographic memory — when he saw something once, he remembered it forever (Lambright 1995: 13–14).

He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1928, with a degree in education, and joined the Marine Corps in 1930 because they were recruiting college graduates for their first aviation program, and he wanted to learn to fly. He completed two years of active duty as a pilot (Lambright 1995). In 1933, he moved to Washington, DC and became an aide on Capitol Hill to a North Carolina congressman, simultaneously attending classes at George Washington University Law School. He dropped out before graduating for financial reasons, but was nonetheless invited to join a Washington law firm and study for the bar exam with a staff attorney, and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1936 (Lambright 1995).

Later that year, he took a position in Brooklyn, New York, as head of personnel at Sperry Gyroscope, a major electronics and equipment manufacturer. During Webb's tenure, Sperry's workforce grew from eight hundred to thirty‐three thousand. Sperry is where he first tested Follett's ideas while head of personnel (Lambright 1995).

In 1946, Webb was chosen by President Harry S. Truman to direct the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), an agency housed in the executive branch that exercised almost total control over the spending of federal money. Webb's string of seemingly unrelated short‐term jobs fit together like a perfect puzzle providing him with excellent references plus the experience, confidence, stamina, and insights to move within the Capitol's culture. “He was a powerful personality; you underestimated him at your peril” (Bizony 2006: vii).

In 1949, Truman, concerned that the U.S. Department of State was badly organized, appointed Webb as undersecretary of state, where he helped reorganize the department and energize the workforce (Heclo and Nelson 1980). This job informed his worldview and gave him another chance to test Follett's ideas, in particular working with large groups (Lambright 1995). At a 1950 dinner meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Secretary of State Dean Acheson praised Webb lavishly (Lambright 1995: 64), declaring:

Webb, a Democrat, left the government in 1953, following the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower as president and took a position in the oil industry in Oklahoma. He returned to Washington in 1960 and was appointed NASA administrator in February 1961 (Lambright 1995).

As he matured, Webb embodied what Malcolm Gladwell called connectors, those who know many people; mavens, those who know where to find information; and salesmen, those who persuade others by using powerful negotiation skills (Gladwell 2000: 4–10, 33–49). But he also had a fourth quality: he had a physicality that exuded power, confidence, and determination. He was a force to contend with when he appeared before congressional committees, presidential briefings, budget reviews, or the press, fully prepared to ask or answer all questions (Lambright 1995).

After Webb's death in 1992, President George Bush said of him: “He will always be remembered as the man who guided the newly created space agency (NASA) to its extraordinary success in the 1960s, culminating in the historic walk on the Moon by an American astronaut. That single event is among this country's proudest moments” (Lambright 1995: 213).

The process of finding the right person to lead NASA had frustrated President John F. Kennedy. Between his election and the inauguration, the new president had made appointments to all his top offices except NASA. Nineteen candidates were interviewed; a few were rejected, but most had turned down the offer.

Webb was approached about the job by Kennedy's science advisor, Jerome Wiesner. He agreed to meet with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, although he was initially uninterested in the position. He was eager to take a leadership position in the government, but “he wasn't keen to be the administrator of NASA” (Lambright 1995: 81–83), telling Hugh Dryden, the current deputy administrator of NASA (whom he already knew and respected), that he didn't consider himself qualified, because he “wasn't an engineer and had never seen a rocket fly” (Lambright 1995: 83–84). Dryden agreed. Webb, however, told Johnson that he would like to meet personally with the president, and Johnson arranged a meeting for that afternoon.

In a 1985 interview, Webb recalled meeting Kennedy, prepared to make the case that he was not the man for the job. “I'd made it clear to everybody that I was not the right person, that you needed a scientist or an engineer,” said Webb. “Well,” Webb continued, “how could you turn down the president of the United States when he says, ‘There's exploration, reaching outward from the earth, which involves great national and international policy questions? I want you to handle it because those are the policies that interest me in my job as president' ” (DeVorkin, Tatarewicz, and Ezell 1985a: March 15, Tape 1, Side 2).

According to Lambright, Webb had the presence of mind to ask Kennedy if he had a preconceived space policy. Kennedy said no; it would be up to Webb to propose a plan. Also, Webb made his acceptance contingent upon Dryden staying on as deputy administrator, to which Kennedy agreed. Kennedy needed Webb, whom he saw as someone he could count on to speak his mind with honesty, but who understood that he, the president, had the final say (Lambright 1995: 84).⁵

Kennedy and Webb often disagreed on the interpretation of policy, but they built enough trust between them that Webb could count on the president's support when NASA needed it — when advocating for the agency in the press, or with the Congress or the BOB, or even with the astronauts. In a 1985 interview (DeVorkin, Tatarewicz, and Ezell 1985b: March 22, Tape 1, Side 2), Webb discussed his working relationship with Kennedy. When Kennedy sometimes called to report he had heard bad news about NASA, Webb would respond, saying:

One story, involving the astronauts, reveals how strong the trust between Kennedy and Webb had grown. In early June of 1963, the Mercury Seven astronauts arrived at Webb's home demanding that he approve one more flight in the Mercury mission. He refused, saying it was time to put Mercury behind them and to turn toward the first Gemini flight. “When the astronauts informed Webb they were going to take their case to the president, he told them to ‘go ahead' ” (Lambright 1995: 11). “Next morning, Webb received a wry phone call from Kennedy: ‘Well, the boys came by to see me last night.’ ‘Yes, I know they did. They left my house, told me they were going down to see you, and I told them to tell you everything on their minds.’ ‘Now you know who's going to make the decision, don't you?’ asked Kennedy. ‘I think I do.’ ‘You know you're going to make it, don't you?’ ‘Yes, that's what I thought,’ ” responded Webb (Bizony 2006: 93–94).

Between the nomination of Webb and his swearing‐in, Webb alerted Hugh Dryden that he wanted him to stay on as deputy administrator. He met with Robert Seamans, liked him, and asked him to remain as associate administrator (DeVorkin, Tatarewicz, and Ezell 1985a: March 15, Tape 1, Side 2).

To solve his dilemma of “not being an engineer and never seeing a rocket fly,” Webb decided to create a leadership “triad” comprising himself, Dryden, and Seamans. The three would make most policy and practice decisions by consensus, with each having his own area of expertise, in which each could make his own decisions but keep the other two informed. The NASA triad had two top‐notch engineer‐managers and Webb, with his rich management and political experience. “No policy would be approved for NASA until the three … had talked it over. None … would do violence to the strongly held opinions of the other …” (Arlington National Cemetery 2006). “For Webb, the triad concept was an article of faith — a tool for management leadership he raised to the utmost importance. It embodied Mary Parker Follett's notion of group power at the level of organizational leadership” (Lambright 1995: 88).

During his Senate confirmation hearing, he set the tone: “His goal as administrator would be to work toward creating an environment within which NASA could be as innovative in the management of its programs as it was in aeronautics and space science. Management innovation would be his theme” (Lambright 1995: 87).

NASA evolved from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which the United States created in 1915 in response to European aviation advances. “Even though the Wright brothers had been the first to make a powered airplane flight in 1903, by the beginning of World War One … the United States lagged behind Europe in airplane technology” (NASA 2009: overview). The committee played a significant role in research and development before and during World War Two.

When Russia launched Sputnik in October of 1957, a satellite that could photograph the world, the shock wave reverberated across America. Within a year, Congress acted; NACA was absorbed into a new, more robust agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Today's NASA sums up its own early history saying, “Against a backdrop of the decade's national tragedies and social changes, the exciting achievements in space gave Americans collective pride” (NASA 2012).

Kennedy strongly believed that “[n]o nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space” (Kennedy 1962). At the time, he was still stinging from Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the earth on April 12 (Russiapedia 2014), as well as the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency's “sponsored” invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs on April 17.⁶ News of the short but successful test flight of the Freedom 7 spacecraft on May 5 by American astronaut Alan Shepard gave Kennedy the good news he needed to request a joint session of the Congress. The race to the moon officially began with that speech, delivered to the U.S. Congress on May 25, 1961 (Kennedy 1961).

Prior to drafting his own message, Kennedy asked Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Webb to draft a joint report on the status of NASA's space capacities. Robert Seamans (1996: 89–90) recalled the process:

Stenographers worked alongside the negotiators all day and evening, creating drafts. They stayed until 2:30 a.m. to prepare the final report, and McNamara quickly approved it the next morning. The document was then turned over to President Kennedy, who approved it “as is.” The changes Webb wanted — the importance of public support, expanding the time line to the end of the decade, and adding “returning him safely to the earth” to the mission were approved and factored into Kennedy's final message to Congress (Lambright 1995: 97–98).

In his speech, the president made an audacious request: “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

“Let it be clear,” Kennedy continued, “… that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action — a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs: 531 million dollars in fiscal '62 — an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years. If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all” (Kennedy 1961).

On that evening, James Webb's already big job became “immense,” what space historian Walter A. McDougall called “a surrealistic task, within a constricted time frame …” (McDougall 1985: 377).

The president had made reaching the moon an “all‐or‐nothing‐at‐all” proposal. He and his advisors were aware they would have to depend upon the public to create sufficient political will to go forward. Interestingly, in the early 1920s, Follett recommended a similar approach to starting the integration process. She wrote: “The first rule, then, for obtaining integration is to put your cards on the table, face the real issue, uncover the conflict, and bring the whole thing into the open” (Follett 1941: 38).

Signs of Follett's influence upon Webb appear in several ways: directly, as when he mentions her in a Government Accounting Office (GAO) lecture (Webb 1971), or indirectly, as during an interview in which a senior NASA employee mentions Follett (Holmes 1962), or by inference, as when her “voice” appears in a NASA pamphlet for the public authored by Webb (Webb 1962).

In his letter to Frances Cooper, Webb wrote: “I am sorry indeed it has taken me so long to answer your two letters about Mary Parker Follett. Her influence was, indeed, profound in all that I did in the Bureau of the Budget and in NASA, and your reference on page 22 is minimal” (Webb 1979.)

In a September 1971 talk that he gave to the Government Accounting Office, Webb described at some length the challenges he had experienced at NASA. He also expressed his concerns over the inadequacy of administrative theory and doctrine to guide managers of large‐scale operations, but, he explained, Follett was an exception. He introduced her through her leadership lens, using direct quotations from a 1927 lecture found in her book Dynamic Administration (1941) titled “Leader and Expert.” He said (Webb 1971: 32):

He then said, “It was my good fortune in the 1930s to study Follett's teachings and seek to apply them in a large and fast growing business enterprise [which would have been the Sperry Gyroscope Company]. I tried to do the same in NASA in the 1960s” (1971: 32–33).

Webb also noted Follett's influence in his conversations with interviewers. In his biography of Webb and during our phone call, Lambright confirmed Follett's impact on Webb's management philosophy and practices. Lambright wrote: “Webb recalled being particularly influenced by the writings of Mary Parker Follett, an organizational social scientist ahead of her time who wrote and lectured early in the twentieth century. … Rather than Taylorism's ‘one best way’ to manage, this flexible iconoclast wrote of the ‘law of the situation’ …” (Lambright 1995: 24.)

Webb also noted Follett's influence in his discussions with Smithsonian curator Martin Collins, who interviewed almost all the key members of the 1960s NASA team. Webb explained who Follett was with enthusiasm, telling Collins that “Mary Parker Follett was a brilliant woman who wrote in the field of public administration and organization of management back in the twenties and thirties, one of the real high spirits of the early days” (Collins 1985).

Follett's quote above reveals much about her approach. She did not see herself as an expert hired to teach people every step and stage of her process. Typically, she presented an idea to an audience, briefly explained it, illustrated the idea with an example or two, and then moved on to another concept, encouraging her listeners, or readers, to experiment on their own. And Webb certainly did experiment.

Webb found Follett's advice to leaders compelling: inspire your workforce to build a common will and to support one another in getting the job done. For Webb that translated to inspiring the NASA workforce to make President Kennedy's goal their own goal (Webb 1971).

His first decision, after accepting the job at NASA, was deciding to work with the existing workforce. As noted earlier, he formed an executive triad comprising himself and two current administrators, Dryden and Seamans. This allowed the current workforce to relax and stop fearing that their jobs were on the line. It also launched a relationship that embodied Follett's principle of “power‐with.” In this kind of relationship, one individual (i.e., a manager or supervisor) does not exert power over another, rather the power is intermingled so it can grow. The creativity released from differences and conflict can find expression.

Webb's executive triad had to tackle some major challenges immediately. The first was the scientific and technical challenges implied in President Kennedy's goal “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” No one really knew what was going to be involved.

In his GAO lecture, Webb (1971) described it this way:

He continued:

I see much Follett in this management summary. She spoke often of “[t]he law of the situation.” She wrote, “We can never understand the total situation without taking into account the evolving situation [emphasis added] (Follett 1924: 59, 69). Later, she added, “There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments” (Follett 1941: 40).

In a 1969 book based on a series of lectures he gave at Columbia University, Webb described some of the common threads running through all large‐scale endeavors. I see Follett's influence in there as well, particularly in Webb's discussion of the role of feedback. “Interaction between the environmental situation and large‐scale endeavors is a continuous and often turbulent process. … This means that for each large‐scale endeavor, there is a critically important need for continuing feedback of information … and, sufficient flexibility in organizational structure and management processes to enable the enterprise to ‘ride out’ unexpected turbulence” (Webb 1969: 60–61). He also described how, when Orville and Wilbur Wright tested their airplanes, they “had to couple a human pilot with his senses and muscles to a system of coordinated machine controls.” “It was thus that skillful use of a coordinated system of control, more than advances in the engine or structure,” that produced success for the Wrights (Webb 1969: 9).

The Wright brothers appear often in Webb's discussions of management. Growing up in North Carolina, where they tested their machines and made their first flights, Webb would have learned about them in school and on family trips. He may not have been an engineer, but he was an aviator who loved flying. Perhaps his readiness to embrace Follett's ideas was due in part to his experience flying and her openness to the limitations of equilibrium. From day one on the job at NASA, he firmly placed management innovation on an equal footing with the need for scientific innovation.⁷

Follett was Webb's favorite source, but not his only one. He also appreciated the work of Harvey Sherman, head of the New York Port Authority and author of It All Depends (1966). Sherman, who knew of Follett, believed organizations should replace the goal of maintaining “equilibrium” with achieving “desired disequilibrium” (Sherman 1966: 27). Follett herself wrote, “whenever we advance we slip from the bondage of equilibrium” (Follett 1924: 53).

My further investigation supported what I found in the letter that James Webb wrote to Frances Cooper and in the transcript of the lecture that he gave at the General Accounting Office: Mary Parker Follett's ideas did indeed profoundly influence Webb's work as director of NASA during the race to the Moon, and, in particular, his working relationship with President John F. Kennedy.

Follett did not want organizational leaders to imitate her, but to experiment instead. Webb had engaged in experimentation as a manager prior to leading NASA and had developed his own style, but the influence of several of Follett's concepts can clearly be seen in his career at NASA. In particular, I see the influcence of Follett's concept of “power‐with” relationships and her appreciation of “the law of the situation.” Further research would, I believe, reveal additional examples of her impact.

And Webb's legacy at NASA is indisputable: in 1996, when NASA made the decision to invest in a more powerful telescope, it was named the James Webb Space Telescope. If all goes as planned, it will be launched in October 2018.