The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization | Peter M. Senge

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization | Peter M. Senge | Excellent book on systemic thinking in business context

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The Fifth Discipli...

	The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization Peter M. Senge Doubleday Business, 2006 - 445 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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

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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.

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Excellent book on systemic thinking in business context

An inspired book on management that puts people really at the center of the stage. From a methodological point of view broad use of System Thinking as a practical tool to interpret reality.

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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