The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

Peter M. Senge

Crown, Mar 31, 2010 - Business & Economics - 464 pages

MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “One of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years.”—Harvard Business Review
 
This revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’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 demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.
 
Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning blocks that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire.
 
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 macrocreativity
• Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets
• Teach you to see the forest and the trees
• End the struggle between work and personal time
 
This updated edition contains more than one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies such as BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and Saudi Aramco and organizations such as Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - scottjpearson - LibraryThing

This book is the seminal statement of systems thinking – the philosophic idea that knowledge is increasingly aligned in groups of thought. And the goal of systems thinking is to produce an ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - paulsignorelli - LibraryThing

Peter Senge's much admired book on building learning organizations and communities of learning is essential reading for trainers and anyone else interested in how successful learning is fostered. He ...

Contents

• Give Me a Lever Long Enough and SingleHanded: 12
• Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?: 19
• Prisoners of the System or Prisoners of Our Own Thinking?: 29
• PART II: 44
• THE CORNERSTONE: 55
• A Shift of Mind: 69
• Identifying the Patterns That: 115
• Personal Mastery: 131
• Mental Models: 163
• 3: 188
• Shared Vision: 191
• Team Learning: 216
• PART IV: 223
• Foundations: 258
• Impetus: 272
• Strategies: 283
• The Leaders New Work: 317
• Systems Citizens: 341
• 17: 363
• The Indivisible Whole: 379
• Systems Archetypes: 389
• The U Process: 401
• Acknowledgments: 425
• Index: 431
• 27: 432
• 92: 438

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
• Author: Peter M. Senge
• Edition: revised
• Publisher: Crown, 2010
• ISBN: 0307477649, 9780307477644
• Length: 464 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Business Communication / General; Business & Economics / Management; Business & Economics / Organizational Development