Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1206 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-21
• Released on: 2006-03-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
"Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The  most successful corporation of the 1990s will be  something called a learning organization." --  Fortune Magazine.

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
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 anothers’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.

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 pers...

Customer Reviews

Systemic thinking: the art of thinking in loops...
I won this book in a lottery and it was on my bookshelf for several years. I thought it would be one of those repetitive bestsellers about management and leadership, so common in this genre. Belonging to this genre, this book could not escape its being repetitive, but the content far outweighed this minor flaw. It was mainly about systemic thinking or systems theory, which is the 5th discipline. I had read about systemic thinking (in a text book by Adalberto Chiavenato), but very superficially. He only made the reference that the organizations are systems similar to living organisms, in the sense that they interact with their environment.

In this book you can find the main structures of systems that scientists have discovered, exemplified with good metaphors and helpful drawings and diagrams:

Self-reassuring growth loops (snow ball effect), growth loops combined with a restraining loop of limitation of resources, restriction loops combined with a mitigation loop, in which symptoms are attacked instead of the root cause, thereby undermining the organization's ability to detect and react to the real problem. In reality several of these loops combine to produce more complex systems and when you add the effect of time, meaning when a delay occurs between the cause and its effect, the cause can get really difficult to grasp. The book explains you the mechanisms behind these loops and how to react once you have discovered them. The only shortcoming of the book is that it does not help you to detect them, it only says that you need practice, ok but where or how to start? Maybe the handbook offers some training examples.

The first four disciplines are not new in management literature and although the chapters on systems thinking are a perfect introduction to the topic, I felt the knowledge on systems thinking that this book transmitted me was still not deep enough. I will try to find more literature on the topic, but I highly recommend this book as a very good start.

A poorly written and contradictory case for systems thinking.
Systems thinking is vital for success in business in and life. Anyone in an organization or leadership position can observe the ripple effects across board from a seemingly simple event. Mr Senge does provide some good pointers and lessons in The Fifth Discipline to understand particular systems. Unfortunately, and most tragically, his explanations to their nature are so weak that he does a tremendous disservice to this new science. I would recommend this book only on the condition that one read Appendix 2 for the archetypes models and chapters 17 and 18.

I could write a ten page essay on the good and bad points of this book. Instead, I will focus on the fundamental error: this is philosophical topic - which the author implicility acknowledges - without a consistent philosophy to back it up. By philosophical, I refer to epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Systems thinking is the conceptual means of observing the interrelationships among actions and phenomena. To explain this, Mr. Senge falls back on a hodgpodge of philosophies, all meshed together, each to rationalize his work. To the layman of philosophy, his work sounds complex and esoteric; to those familiar, confusing and mostly contradictory. Basically, he tries to "prove" an objective, scientific process, such as systems, using empircal data with mysticism (knowledge by a non-objective means or process). Systems are, more or less, a series of sequential logical effects initiated from a cause. Reading Senge, he portays them as some autonomous Hegelian archetype floating around, dominating people and process. The reason we do not see systems is because, according to him, western thought is "linear" (no satisfactory explanation is provided for how and why). Expecting us to agree with him, he moves forward by answering the next logical question: How are we then to understand systems? Through eastern mysticism (Senge is very sympathetic to Buddhism). In other words, we must rely on a system of ideas which is openly hostile to logic, this worldly knowledge, and especially individualism and materialism. This is very strange considering business is grounded in those very things.

Ironically, Senge is a self-proclaimed pragmatist (this comes from an interview he did after this book). Pragmatism is a western philosophy which states certainty is impossible, nothing is absolute, and what is true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow. He ascribes the West's deficiency in system thinking due to its the short-range, concrete bound mentality, i.e. those who only see "snapshots" of life. Believe it or not, this is the very epistemology which pragmatism promotes! It should be then no surprise he rarely defines any of his terms. He substitutes objective definitions for barrages of concrete bound examples.

Had Senge realized that systems thinking even applies to the field of ideas, in particulary philosophy, he might have recognized his contradictions, such as interpreting an objective science with mystical lens, and condemning western ideas despite being its very product. However, since he is a pragmatist, and only concerned with "current reality" (a phenomena which he speaks of multiple times and does not define), contradictions are not an issue. All this is presented in an unnecessarily long, confusing, and tedious book.

Bunch of unstructured good concepts
The book indeed brings some refreshing observations on the topic of the learning organization. However, on the very beginning of my reading I had an impression that the Author came up to most of the conclusions in this book through meditation. This aura is covering the complete book. There are a lot of nice ideas and comments but it is very blur for understanding. I would say, that structuring of the chapters themselves was not done in the best possible way. This book would have a nice potential and could have gained a much broader audience if it was written in a more comprehensible way. For example third discipline "Mental models" should be a part of a first discipline "Personal Mastery" and not a separate one.

What the Author is trying to explain is that organization is like a mathematical function. If you influence on one of the function variables, function will give a different result. Therefore you should be very careful before making any decisions significant for the organization. Sort of an Organizational process engineering if you ask me, but in some abstract form.