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The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (Paperback)
by Peter M. Senge
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Learning organization, Change management, Corporate transformation |
| Market price: ¥ 258.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Peter Senge, who was associated with the "learning organization" concept, wrote a great cookbook for change management. |
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Author: Peter M. Senge
Publisher: Currency
Pub. in: March, 2006
ISBN: 0385517254
Pages: 464
Measurements: 9.0 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00043
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- Awards & Credential -
A National Bestseller in North America with more than one million copies sold, the author was given the credit for the "learning organization" framework. |
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- MSL Picks -
Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organization. - Fortune
Since I read this book 15 years ago, the idea of the learning organization has embedded itself in my brain and not let go. I've been on a search to find or create the learning organization ever since. I've never been sure that it really exists in practice, so it's good to see that the revised edition adds the reflections of some successful practitioners, demonstrating that learning organizations have emerged, even if they are almost as rare as they were before the first edition of Senge's book was published.
But learning may be about to become less rare in our organizations. The 21st century brings a networked world of business - and in this era only living, learning organizations will be able to adapt and survive. All companies will be linked in a global ecosystem. No company will know when and where the next competitor will emerge. To sustain themselves, all organizations will need to constantly innovate and learn.
Senge's book is worth having and keeping on your bookshelf because it gets to the essence of what's needed to create a learning organization. Senge describes five disciplines that must be mastered at all levels of the organization:
1. Personal mastery - clarifying personal vision, focusing energy, and seeing reality
2. Shared vision - transforming individual vision into shared vision
3. Mental models - unearthing internal pictures and understanding how they shape actions
4. Team learning - suspending judgments and creating dialogue
5. Systems thinking - fusing the four learning disciplines; from seeing the parts to seeing wholes
As Senge explains, the fifth discipline is particularly important because it ties the others together and helps explain the complex behavior and outcomes that happen in organizations. It illuminates the feedback loops - the growth cycles, control cycles, and delays that drive our organizational systems. Senge's book gives us a language for understanding these systems and explaining their dramatic successes and failures - the virtuous cycles and death spirals that are weekly reported in the news - and shows us a way of thinking that can help us copy patterns of victory and avoid patterns of defeat.
Learning organizations are rare because the five disciplines are hard. It's self-evident that personal mastery, shared vision, self awareness, and team learning are essential components of a great company, but to master these disciplines in a large organization requires a level of communication, relationship-building, conflict resolution, and the attendant time and commitment, than most people have the capability or willingness to invest. Even in a small team this is hard: the changes we need are at odds with conventional wisdom and conventional management. Currently, it is only the exceptional leader who is able to defy conventional wisdoms and have the personal vision to build a learning organization.
This may be about to change. Business and society are experiencing a dramatic shift. Global business and global development are transforming everything. Organizations will have to adapt or they will not survive. Only vital, living organizations will manage to sustain themselves - and the vitality they need will not be created by accident, it will have to come from mastery of the five disciplines of the learning organization.
Senge's work is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how to design, build, and sustain - or even work in - a learning organization. It may not be the only answer, and the ideas are certainly hard to put into practice, but the experiments are encouraging. There is a better way of working, and the ideas in this book will help us find it. (From quoting Graham Lawes, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, nonprofit and government leaders, HR practitioners, professionals, and MBAs.
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Peter 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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From the Pulblisher:
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
The only sustainable source of competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than its competitors. The Fifth Discipline shows the way. Reading it is an eye-opening experience on every level, both personally and professionally.
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Give Me a Lever Long Enough… And Single-Handed I Can Move The World
From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to "see the big picture," we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile – similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether.
The tools and ideas presented in this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion–we can then build "learning organizations," organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.
As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and dynamic, work must become more "learningful." It is no longer sufficient to have one person learning for the organization, a Ford or a Sloan or a Watson or a Gates. It's just not possible any longer to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist." The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own. Learning organizations are possible because not only is it our nature to learn but we love to learn. Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great team, a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way– who trusted one another, who complemented one another’s strengths and compensated for one another's limitations, who had common goals that were larger than individual goals, and who produced extraordinary results. I have met many people who have experienced this sort of profound teamwork – in sports, or in the performing arts, or in business. Many say that they have spent much of their life looking for that experience again. What they experienced was a learning organization. The team that became great didn’t start off great–it learned how to produce extraordinary results.
One could argue that the entire global business community is learning to learn together, becoming a learning community. Whereas once many industries were dominated by a single, undisputed leader–one IBM, one Kodak, one Xerox–today industries, especially in manufacturing, have dozens of excellent companies. American, European, or Japanese corporations are pulled forward by innovators in China, Malaysia, or Brazil, and they in turn, are pulled by the Koreans and Indians. Dramatic improvements take place in corporations in Italy, Australia, Singapore–and quickly become influential around the world.
There is also another, in some ways deeper, movement toward learning organizations, part of the evolution of industrial society. Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people's orientation toward work–from what Daniel Yankelovich called an "instrumental" view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more "sacred" view, where people seek the "intrinsic" benefits of work.(1) "Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon," says Bill O'Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. "The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man's higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging."
Moreover, many who share these values are now in leadership positions. I find a growing number of organizational leaders who, while still a minority, feel they are part of a profound evolution in the nature of work as a social institution. "Why can't we do good works at work?" asked Edward Simon, former president of Herman Miller, a sentiment I often hear repeated today. In founding the "Global Compact," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan invited businesses around the world to build learning communities that elevate global standards for labor rights, and social and environmental responsibility.
Perhaps the most salient reason for building learning organizations is that we are only now starting to understand the capabilities such organizations must possess. For a long time, efforts to build learning organizations were like groping in the dark until the skills, areas of knowledge, and paths for development of such organizations became known. What fundamentally will distinguish learning organizations from traditional authoritarian "controlling organizations" will be the mastery of certain basic disciplines. That is why the "disciplines of the learning organization" are vital.
DISCIPLINES OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZA TION
On a cold, clear morning in December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the fragile aircraft of Wilbur and Orville Wright proved that powered flight was possible. Thus was the airplane invented; but it would take more than thirty years before commercial aviation could serve the general public.
Engineers say that a new idea has been "invented" when it is proven to work in the laboratory. The idea becomes an "innovation" only when it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at practical costs. If the idea is sufficiently important, such as the telephone, the digital computer, or commercial aircraft, it is called a "basic innovation," and it creates a new industry or transforms an existing industry. In these terms, learning organizations have been invented, but they have not yet been innovated.
In engineering, when an idea moves from an invention to an innovation, diverse "component technologies" come together. Emerging from isolated developments in separate fields of research, these components gradually form an ensemble of technologies that are critical to one another's success. Until this ensemble forms, the idea, though possible in the laboratory, does not achieve its potential in practice.(2)
The Wright brothers proved that powered flight was possible, but the McDonnel Douglas DC3, introduced in 1935, ushered in the era of commercial air travel. The DC3 was the first plane that supported itself economically as well as aerodynamically. During those intervening thirty years (a typical time period for incubating basic innovations), myriad experiments with commercial flight had failed. Like early experiments with learning organizations, the early planes were not reliable and cost-effective on an appropriate scale.
The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component technologies that formed a successful ensemble. They were: the variable-pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of lightweight molded body construction called "monocque," a radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps. To succeed, the DC3 needed all five; four were not enough. One year earlier, the Boeing 247 was introduced with all of them except wing flaps. Boeing's engineers found that the plane, lacking wing flaps, was unstable on takeoff and landing, and they had to downsize the engine.
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Today, I believe, five new component technologies are gradually converging to innovate learning organizations. Though developed separately, each will, I believe, prove critical to the others' success, just as occurs with any ensemble. Each provides a vital dimension in building organizations that can truly "learn," that can continually enhance their capacity to realize their highest aspirations:
Systems Thinking. A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know the storm runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.
Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.
Though the tools are new, the underlying worldview is extremely intuitive; experiments with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly.
Personal Mastery. "Mastery" might suggest gaining dominance over people or things. But mastery can also mean a special level of proficiency. A master craftsman doesn't dominate pottery or weaving. People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them – in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization's spiritual foundation. An organization's commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members. The roots of this discipline lie in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and in secular traditions as well.
Bu few organizations encourage the growth of their people in this manner. This results in vast untapped resources: "People enter business as bright, well-educated, high-energy people, full of energy and desire to make a difference," says Hanover's O'Brien. "By the time they are 30, a few are on the fast track and the rest 'put in their time' to do what matters to them on the weekend. They lose the commitment, the sense of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers. We get damn little of their energy and almost none of their spirit."
And surprisingly few adults work to rigorously develop their own personal mastery. When you ask most adults what they want from their lives, they often talk first about what they'd like to get rid of: "I'd like my mother-in-law to move out," they say, or "I'd like my back problems to clear up." The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.
Here, I am most interested in the connections between personal learning and organizational learning, in the reciprocal commitments between individual and organization, and in the special spirit of an enterprise made up of learners.
Mental Models. Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. For example, we may notice that a coworker dresses elegantly, and say to ourselves, "She's a country club person." About someone who dresses shabbily, we may feel, "He doesn't care about what others think." Mental models of what can or cannot be done in different management settings are no less deeply entrenched. Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models.
For example, in the early 1970s, Royal Dutch/Shell, became one of the first large organizations to understand how pervasive was the influence of hidden mental models. Shell's success in the 1970s and 1980s (rising from one of the weakest of the big seven oil companies to one of the strongest along with Exxon) during a period of unprecedented changes in the world oil business–the formation of OPEC, extreme fluctuations in oil prices and availability, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union–came in large measure from learning how to surface and challenge managers' mental models as a discipline for preparing change. Arie de Geus, Shell's Coordinator of Group Planning during the 80s, said that continuous adaptation and growth in a changing business environment depends on "institutional learning, which is the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models of the company, their markets, and their competitors. For this reason, we think of planning as learning and of corporate planning as institutional learning."(3)
The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny. It also includes the ability to carry on "learningful" conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others.
Building Shared Vision. If any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, it's the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create. One is hard pressed to think of any organization that has sustained some measure of greatness in the absence of goals, values, and missions that become deeply shared throughout the organization. IBM had "service"; Polaroid had instant photography; Ford had public transportation for the masses and Apple had "computers for the rest of us."(4) Though radically different in content and kind, all these organizations managed to bind people together around a common identity and sense of destiny.
When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar "vision statement"), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to. But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization. All too often, a company’s shared vision has revolved around the charisma of a leader, or around a crisis that galvanizes everyone temporarily. But, given a choice, most people opt for pursuing a lofty goal, not only in times of crisis but at all times. What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision–not a "cookbook" but a set of principles and guiding practices.
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.
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Richard Teeerlink (President and CEO, Harley-Davidson, Inc.) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
If you believe, as I do, that people are only competitive advantage and lifelong learning is the way to fully develop that advantage, you must read this book. |
D. Nishimoto (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
The bottom line to Senge's book, "The fifth Discipline" is the message companies need to leverage. Leveraging is removing barriers, responding to customer feedback, and making changes that have a big effect. Leveraging requires a change in thinking.
A shift in mindset from linear too circular thinking; circular thinking helps the individual too understanding the balancing processes of the organization and increases organization learning about these process. As the organization learns it improves by designing additional balancing process giving the managers leverage to expand and grow. Circular thinking is the ability to see the forest through the tree or in other words the ability to see the long-term vision of the company and be able to communicate the vision through out the organization.
Whereas, Linear thinking states "I see a problem and the effect must be this." Linear thinking tends to be a trial and error approach to problem solving. It attempts to change one factor at a time and what the resulting effect. It is a deductive approach to problem solving assuming that the cause is directly linked to the effect in a simple one to one basis. This assumption and problem solving approach is not always effective or true as systems become more complex.
Whereas, system thinking is looking for all the factors that make up the balancing system and examining who each factor effects the other factor or combinations of factors combine to cause a process imbalance. Circular thinking helps eliminates fragmented thinking about a system by providing a comprehensive series of factors describing the processes of the system.
What is leveraging? Leveraging is system thinking at its best. Leveraging is anticipating and designing for future needs that will occur from potential growth. Leveraging is designing and implementing plant expansion before the demand crisis occurs and causes cyclic production patterns caused by performance breakdowns.
Most company's fight system thinking, settling on operational thinking by advocating, "How can I ask the board to expend millions of dollars without proof of demand?" or more generically, "if it is not broke why invest in expansion." Feedback rather than demand is the motivating force behind the fifth discipline. Demand is both difficult to predict and measure with many companies measure the wrong components of demand and thus investing the their money in the wrong place, such as, Airlines investing in customer service rather than convenience and punctuality. Feedback is listening to the customers that support your business and giving them what they want and need. Profit occurs, as customers are willing to pay for what they need.
These stochastic arguments hold up in stagnate business environments where the company has matured its business models. However, in fast growth and high demand business models high lights elements of constraint theory. Constraint theory looks at the whole system and examines the effects of "bottle-necks" and further examines the behavior of the buyer, middleman, and supplier. Senge illustrates in his analogy of lover's beer the problem constraint theory creates for the retailer, the consumer, and the beer manufacturing plant and in the case study, Senge tells about how a bar which serves lover's beer responses to sudden consumer demand for the beer and over purchases the beer inventory in response to delays or backlogs in his inventory from the wholesaler with his inventories reaching 10 to 20 times their normal counts and the wholesaler delays caused by production cycles to ferment the beer and plant capacity.
The lover's beer case study ends with the consumer becoming disinterested in the beer partial caused by a poor reputation by the bar to provide the product even though the reasons to try the beer originally were very important. Interesting what started the trend was a ending phrase "lover's beer" from a popular music group with the patrons wanting to try lover's beer even with a two week wait, obviously a loyal customer.
Senge further explains business model fortifies the concept of leveraging with the case study of "Wonder-Machines". Wonder-Machines is a new company with a breakthrough PC that everyone wants. Wonder-Machines starts out with an adequate production line capable of meeting existing customer orders and due to the quality and price of the new machine it reputation improves significantly causing an increase in demand.
"Wonder-Machines" experiences 200 percent growth annually and sells a product customers and potential customer will want, so it meet higher than expected increases in customer demand. Thinking linearly management reacts by increasing the number of shifts which provides a short-term solution to a large problem, rapid growth.
Wonder-Machine errors by holding off building a new plant taking a "wait and see" approach for production expansion. So, Wonder-Machine production delays increased eventually forcing the company to invest in another plant and about the plant is completed, demand suddenly drops.
In response to the drop in sales an aggressive sales campaign is launched to turn the company back into profit and because marketing and sells are a direct line between the company and the customer, poor performing salesmen are fired and higher performing salesmen are given larger financial incentives.
The sales campaign works too well causing more orders to come in than the company can handle and a twelve-week time lag starts to emerge. Twelve weeks is created a group of angry customers and faced with growth, high costs for another plant, and inconsistent sales demand the company eventually invests into another plant but because of poor time delivery times the company has gained a reputation of being late on delivery and the customer types are shifting from loyal customer who prize the quality of the product to ones that look for price. Competitors see the market inefficiency and start to create their niche on price and Wonder-Machines goes bankrupt.
Fifth discipline suggests that the problem is not aggressive promoting reinforcement of factor but removing system barriers. Removal of barriers is the results of system thinking. System thinking assumes "cause and effect" is a complex process of discovering all the big picture factors and because the process is complex multiple people will be required to create the big picture. Leveraging examines the balances in the process and designs parallel balancing processes to meet future growth. Leveraging is not guessing at the future rather leveraging is removing obvious barriers to growth and profits. Leveraging allows for sudden increased loads caused from demand and reduces delays, and allows small changes to produce large results; such as full service grocery stores to self service grocery stores.
Feedback is the driving force behind leveraging. Customer feedback helps manager understand areas to start leveraging and building to meet customer needs. Meeting customer needs drives system thinking about the balancing processes that must be consider to meet the customer needs. The circular series of factors interacting with the balancing process is access against customer feedback to determine whether the solutions are working. |
Robert Crawford (MSL quote), France
<2006-12-27 00:00>
All too often, I find myself acting cynically about my field and ready to dismiss just about anything as mediocre, no matter how popular or praised. Well, this is one book that I think is really excellent - for content, for clarity, for sincerity, for the stories reported in it.
When I plow through a business book, I try to see if I can remember the central ideas, the essence of what the author has to say from the mass of details and stories that make up every business book. Most often, they are appalingly banal and pathetically over-applied, touted as able to solve just about every problem, in particular if a fee is paid to the authors to come and talk about it in person. I was preparted to treat this book the same way, and was simply delighted to find a truly excellent and useful book. And gee, I am glad that I can get inspired by a book in my chosen field, rather than bored!
As I see it, this book has three principal ideas. First, we must think of organizations and their missions as complex systems rather than as conglomerations of isolated problems. It is pitch for the development of a holistic view - how everything interacts and what factors act upon what other factors. This is an analytical tool that can pinpoint what should be done, breaking mental habits of looking only at the bottom line of sales revenues, for example, rather than the need to provide better service or delivery times. Second, employees must be empowered to make their own decisions locally, requiring honesty and openness throughout the organization as standard practice. This enables them to question and learn, not just individually but as part of a unified team, hence the subtitle of a learning organization. Mistakes are part of this process and should be allowed as valid experiments. Third, the task of a leader is to design an organizational system within which this can all be accomplished. Rather than control all decisions in a centralized manner in accordance with a rigid plan, the leader must develop a vision of where they organization should go and then allow his employees to pursue that vision as a team with great autonomy.
I have wanted to read this book for almost ten years. It was first pointed out to me by a remarkable business leader in mainland China, Zhang Ruimin, the founder of the Haier Group, as a seminal text for him. He said that he had built a learning organization in accordance with Senge's prescriptions, and after so many years, I see that indeed he did. What this book did for me was to give me a better idea of Zhang's mind and what went on in it. But it has also given me a clearer idea of many other remarkable entrepreneurs whom I have had the pleasure and honor to meet over the years in my work. As Senge explained, these men had a vision, but used the gap that existed between their vision and current reality to inspire their workers to achieve remarkable things. And they created self-reinforcing systems to do so.
Another fascinating aspect of this book is that, in spite of being nearly 15 years old, it felt fresh and its examples did not feel stale and in need of updates. Many books that old extoll Japan as the model to emulate and explain why that country does everything better than everyone else. Just take a look at Porter's books! While this book has some examples from Japan, it does not fall into that trap - for me, that means its analyses have stood the test of time.
This is one of the best business books I ever read - and I have read way way too many of them! Warmly recommended. |
Krystle (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
If I had to choose one book to teach people what organizations are supposed to be all about, this would be it. The Fifth Discipline is one of those rare, classic points of reference...It's to business what A Pattern Language is to architecture. Peter Senge gets to the core of what people working in groups can achieve, and what stops them from getting there.
I have to admit, however, that when I first heard about this book, I didn't really want to read it. I'd just started getting into sustainability, and I'd heard the name of this book thrown around in the subject more than once. But to me it seemed like just another dry business book. It wasn't till years later when someone recommended I read it as an introduction to systems thinking that I went out and borrowed a copy from the library. After reading only a few chapters, I knew this was one of those books I had to have for myself. And yes, it IS filled with a lot of business talk, but it's also packed with concepts and principles that are applicable to ANYONE trying to be more effective in his or her life.
In fact, my favorite chapter in this book was the one on personal mastery. I've read my fair share of both business and self-help books, and this chapter alone is by far the clearest description I've ever read of individual success. I bought myself a copy of this book based solely on the merit of this one chapter. So the rest, for me, was like a bonus. When I finally finished reading it, I felt like I got a lot more than I paid for.
For one thing, I came away with a solid understanding of systems thinking, or the "fifth discipline" that the book is named after. This book is PACKED with examples and stories to help readers understand a handful of eye-opening, timeless principles. While some of the business-based illustrations are SO in-depth that I couldn't help but skip over them, it's nice having them there for future reference. Even if you have very little tolerance for business jargon, then get a copy from the library and read it for the concepts, especially Chapters 1, 4, and 9.
While The Fifth Discipline might seem like it caters to business people who want to achieve this thing called a "learning organization," don't be fooled. Peter Senge has succeeded in writing a book is useful for anyone who wants to change things, and ESSENTIAL for those of us who seek to do it through business. |
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