The Fifth Discipline, 2^nd Ed.

The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization

Peter M. Senge

Publisher: Doubleday, 1994 , 423 pages

ISBN: 0-385-26095-4

Synopsis:

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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

The Currency paperback 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.

Table of Contents:

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• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• Some Tips for First-Time Readers
• 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"
2. Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?
3. Prisoners of the System, or Prisoners of Our Own Thinking?
• Part II: The Fifth Discipline: The Cornerstone of The Learning Organization
4. The Laws of the Fifth Discipline
5. A Shift of Mind
6. Nature's Templates: Identifying the Patterns That Control Events
7. The Principle of Leverage
8. The Art of Seeing the Forest and the Trees
• Part III: The Core Disciplines: Building The Learning Organization
9. Personal Mastery
10. Mental Models
11. Shared Vision
12. Team Learning
• Part IV: Prototypes
13. Openness
14. Localness
15. A Manager's Time
16. Ending the War Between Work and Family
17. Microworlds: The Technology of the Learning Organization
18. The Leader's New Work
• Part V: Coda
19. A Sixth Discipline?
20. Rewriting the Code
21. The Indivisible Whole
• Appendix 1: The Learning Disciplines
• Appendix 2: Systems Archetypes