Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. Broadway Business, 2006.
Referenced in: Leadership and Organizational Culture
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Part of the challenge of transformational and empowering leadership is helping congregations understand how to break out of missionally ineffective patterns. Often churches “keep on doing what they have always done, and keep on getting what they’ve always gotten,” and the results are discouraging. Churches, like all organizations, develop ingrained patterns that stunt their ability to learn and break into exciting and creative times of mission engagement. This is a long-time business best-seller that when applied to congregations, shows leaders how to help people think, learn continually, and free themselves from mission-defeating patterns.
From the Publisher
Completely Updated and Revised
This revised edition of Peter Senge’s bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.
In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations – ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire.
The updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future.
Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will:
- Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them
- Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity
- Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets
- Teach you to see the forest and the trees
- End the struggle between work and personal time
Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a “learning organization” that used “systems thinking” as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy. He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released in 1990, written for those interested in integrating his philosophy into their corporate culture.
From the Publisher
An MIT Professor’s path-breaking book on building “learning organizations” — corporations that overcome inherent obstacles to learning and develop dynamic ways to pinpoint the threats that face them and to recognize new opportunities. Not only is the learning organization a new source of competitive advantage, it also offers a marvelously empowering approach to work, one which promises that, as Archimedes put it, “with a lever long enough… single-handed I can move the world.”
“Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organization.” — Fortune Magazine. —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
An MIT Professor’s pathbreaking book on building “learning organizations” — corporations that overcome inherent obstacles to learning and develop dynamic ways to pinpoint the threats that face them and to recognize new opportunities. Not only is the learning organization a new source of competitive advantage, it also offers a marvelously empowering approach to work, one which promises that, as Archimedes put it, “with a lever long enough… single-handed I can move the world
Editorial Reviews
The Fifth Discipline has turned many readers into true believers; it remains the ideal introduction to Senge’s carefully integrated corporate framework, which is structured around “personal mastery,” “mental models,” “shared vision,” and “team learning.” Using ideas that originate in fields from science to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it’s like to operate under this system. The book’s concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever. – Amazon.com, Howard Rothman
A director at MIT’s Sloan School, Senge here proposes the “systems thinking” method to help a corporation to become a “learning organization,” one that integrates at all personnel levels indifferently related company functions (sales, product design, etc.) to “expand the ability to produce.” He describes requisite disciplines, of which systems-thinking is the fifth. Others include “personal mastery” of one’s capacities and “team learning” through group discussion of individual objectives and problems. Employees and managers are also encouraged to examine together their often negative perceptions or “mental models” of company people and procedures. The text is esoteric and flavored with terms like “recontextualized rationality,” but the book should help inventory-addled retailers whom the author cites as unaware of their customers’ desire for quality. —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
PETER M. SENGE is the founding chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning and a senior lecturer at MIT. He is the co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, and Schools That Learn (part of the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook series) and has lectured extensively throughout the world. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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