Where do authority and responsibility belong in a business?

Written 99 years ago. Applicable today. Doable today. Even if you are only a very small business. Especially if you're only a very small business.

Everywhere. Of course.

I'm working my way through 'Dynamic Administration' a collection of papers on management by Mary Parker Follett.

She of the “one person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation.” quote.

I haven't yet got my head well enough around it to be able to summarise for you, but I can see some glimmers of an argument that I think chimes with my thinking.

It doesn't help of course that she writes in 1925, about mainly US, mainly manufacturing businesses.

Any old how, here are some passages that speak to me: :

'This phrase "Delegating authority", assumes that the owner or chief executive has the '"right" to all the authority, but that it is useful to delegate some of it. I do not think that the president or general manager should have any more authority than goes with his function. Therefore I do not see how you can delegate authority except when you are ill, or take a vacation. And then you have not exactly delegated authority. Someone is doing your work and he has the authority which goes with that particular piece of work. Authority belongs with the job and stays with the job.'

and then this one:

'Authority and responsibility go with function, but as the essence of organisation is the interweaving of functions, authority and responsibility we now see as a matter of interweaving. An order, a command, is a step in a process, a moment in the movement of interweaving experience. We should guard against thinking this step a larger part of the whole process than it really is. There is all that leads to the order, all that comes afterwards - methods of administration, the watching and recording of results, what flows out of it to make further orders. ... There is a process. ... The form of organisation [of a business KG] should be such as to allow or induce the continuous coordination of the experiences of men. ... Authority is inherent in the situation. Legitimate authority flows from coordination.'

'this conception [of authority and responsibility] makes each one's work tremendously important. If you see that your activity is, in its measure contributing to authority, in the sense that it is part of the guiding will which runs the plant, it will add interest and dignity to the most commonplace life, will illumine the most routine duties.'

'Instead then, of final determination, supreme control, ultimate authority, we might perhaps think of cumulative control, cumulative resposibility.'

In Disappearing Boss language:

A business isn't an organisation chart, it's a system of processes.
Authority and responsibility belong with the Roles that run those processes, each of which contributes to the overarching purpose of the enterprise - to make and keep promises to the people it serves.
Once the bones of the processes are clear, anyone trained in a Role can take that responsibility, shoulder that authority.

In other words, if you do what a Boss does, you are also a Boss.

And Discipline is what makes that Daring possible.