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

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

Senge's pathbreaking book draws on science, spiritual wisdom, psychology, and the cutting edge of management thought to show how businesses can overcome their "learning disabilites" and beat the odds of failure. The book provides a searching personal experience and a dramatic professional shift of mind.

Peter Senge's groundbreaking ideas on building organizations have made him a household name amongst corporate managers. His theories help businesses to clarify their goals, to defy the odds, to more clearly understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers a marvelously empowering approach to work.

Mastery of Senge's five disciplines enables managers to overcome their obstacles to growth and creates brave new futures for them and their companies. The five disciplines are drawn from science, spiritual wisdom, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought, and Senge's own work with top corporations that employ his methods. Listening to The Fifth Discipline provides a searching personal experience and a dramatic professional shift of mind.

Publishers Weekly

A director at MIT's Sloan School, Senge here proposes the ``systems thinking'' method to help a corporation to become a ``learning organization,'' one that integrates at all personnel levels indifferently related company functions (sales, product design, etc.) to ``expand the ability to produce.'' He describes requisite disciplines, of which systems-thinking is the fifth. Others include ``personal mastery'' of one's capacities and ``team learning'' through group discussion of individual objectives and problems. Employees and managers are also encouraged to examine together their often negative perceptions or ``mental models'' of company people and procedures. The text is esoteric and flavored with terms like ``recontextualized rationality,'' but the book should help inventory-addled retailers whom the author cites as unaware of their customers' desire for quality. Macmillan Book Clubs selection. (Aug.)

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.