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

Peter M. Senge

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In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is you organization's ability to learn faster than its competition.

Founder and Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, which boasts such members as Intel, Ford, Herman Miller, and Harley Davidison, author Peter M. Senge has found a means of creating a "learning organization." In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blue prints for an organization where people 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. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organization more effective than the sum of its parts.

Company after company. from Intel to AT&T to Procter & Gamble to Coopers and Lybrand, have adopted the disciplines of the learning organization to rid themselves of the learning "disabilities" embedded in how we think and work together. Mastering the disciplines 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 family time

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."

This edition contains a new introduction, which welcomes readers to the ever-expanding community of learners united by their passionate belief in these ideas and helps peole encountering this work for the first time.

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.

	Introduction to the Paperback Edition	ix
	Some Tips for First-Time Readers	xxi
	PART I HOW OUR ACTIONS CREATE OUR REALITY... AND HOW WE CAN CHANGE IT
1	"Give Me a Lever Long Enough . . . and Single-Handed I Can Move the World"	3
2	Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?	17
3	Prisoners of the System, or Prisoners of Our Own Thinking?	27
	PART II THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE: THE CORNERSTONE OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION
4	The Laws of the Fifth Discipline	57
5	A Shift of Mind	68
6	Nature's Templates: Identifying the Patterns That Control Events	93
7	The Principle of Leverage	114
8	The Art of Seeing the Forest and the Trees	127
	PART III THE CORE DISCIPLINES: BUILDING THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION
9	Personal Mastery	139
10	Mental Models	174
11	Shared Vision	205
12	Team Learning	233
	PART IV PROTOTYPES
13	Openness	273
14	Localness	287
15	A Manager's Time	302
16	Ending the War Between Work and Family	306
17	Microworlds: The Technology of the Learning Organization	313
18	The Leader's New Work	339
	PART V CODA
19	A Sixth Discipline?	363
20	Rewriting the Code	364
21	The Indivisible Whole	368
	Appendix l: The Learning Disciplines	373
	Appendix 2: Systems Archetypes	378
	Notes	391
	Acknowledgments	411
	Index	414

The Fifth Discipline Hardcover/2006
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
The Dance of Change
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future
The Leader's Window : Mastering the Four Styles of Leadership to Build High-Performing Teams