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

"Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organizations. Because of them, few corporations live even half as long as a person - most die before they reach the age of forty."

So writes MIT's Peter Senge in this pathbreaking book on building "learning organizations" - organizations that defy these odds, that overcome learning disabilities to clearly understand threats and 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.

Perhaps your own organization is subject to crippling learning disabilities:

• The delusion of learning from experience: We have always put our faith in trial and error. That's how we learned to talk, walk, and eat. But attempting to understand the future by relying on the past only forces us to try and solve the same problems over and over again. All of our effort only makes the problem worse.
• "I hit him because he took my ball." We fixate on events, just as we've done since childhood. Last month's sales, new budget cuts, who just got promoted or fired. Yet the primary threats to our survival today come not from events but from slow gradual processes to which we are 90 percent blind.
• The myth of teamwork. Most teams operate below the level of the lowest IQ in the group. The result is "skilled incompetence," in which people in groups grow incredibly efficient at keeping themselves from learning.

Mastery of Senge's five disciplines enables us to overcome these disabilities and so create brave new futures for ourselves. The Fifth Discipline is a remarkable book that draws on science, spiritual wisdom, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought, and on Senge's work with top corporations that employ fifth discipline methods. Reading it provides a searching personal experience and a dramatic professional shift of mind.

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