Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Since I read this book 15 years ago, the idea of the learning organization has embedded itself in my brain and not let go. I've been on a search to find or create the learning organization ever since. I've never been sure that it really exists in practice, so it's good to see that the revised edition adds the reflections of some successful practitioners, demonstrating that learning organizations have emerged, even if they are almost as rare as they were before the first edition of Senge's book was published.

But learning may be about to become less rare in our organizations. The 21st century brings a networked world of business -- and in this era only living, learning organizations will be able to adapt and survive. All companies will be linked in a global ecosystem. No company will know when and where the next competitor will emerge. To sustain themselves, all organizations will need to constantly innovate and learn.

Senge's book is worth having and keeping on your bookshelf because it gets to the essence of what's needed to create a learning organization. Senge describes five disciplines that must be mastered at all levels of the organization:

1. Personal mastery -- clarifying personal vision, focusing energy, and seeing reality
2. Shared vision -- transforming individual vision into shared vision
3. Mental models -- unearthing internal pictures and understanding how they shape actions
4. Team learning -- suspending judgments and creating dialogue
5. Systems thinking -- fusing the four learning disciplines; from seeing the parts to seeing wholes

As Senge explains, the fifth discipline is particularly important because it ties the others together and helps explain the complex behavior and outcomes that happen in organizations. It illuminates the feedback loops -- the growth cycles, control cycles, and delays that drive our organizational systems. Senge's book gives us a language for understanding these systems and explaining their dramatic successes and failures.-- the virtuous cycles and death spirals that are weekly reported in the news -- and shows us a way of thinking that can help us copy patterns of victory and avoid patterns of defeat.

Learning organizations are rare because the five disciplines are hard. It's self-evident that personal mastery, shared vision, self awareness, and team learning are essential components of a great company, but to master these disciplines in a large organization requires a level of communication, relationship-building, conflict resolution, and the attendant time and commitment, than most people have the capability or willingness to invest. Even in a small team this is hard: the changes we need are at odds with conventional wisdom and conventional management. Currently, it is only the exceptional leader who is able to defy conventional wisdoms and have the personal vision to build a learning organization.

This may be about to change. Business and society are experiencing a dramatic shift. Global business and global development are transforming everything. Organizations will have to adapt or they will not survive. Only vital, living organizations will manage to sustain themselves -- and the vitality they need will not be created by accident, it will have to come from mastery of the five disciplines of the learning organization.

Senge's work is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how to design, build, and sustain -- or even work in -- a learning organization. It may not be the only answer, and the ideas are certainly hard to put into practice, but the experiments are encouraging. There is a better way of working, and the ideas in this book will help us find it.

Graham Lawes

I read many business books-this is the best I've read in years, maybe ever. Now I know why so many other business books, methods and cultures leave me feeling empty. The insight in Fifth Discipline aligns with my mental models and suggests a path for achieving great things, rather than for getting promoted or making a buck.

Here's my take on a couple of the disciplines:

Systems Thinking: Believing in myths about business leads us to make the same mistakes again and again. We cannot escape these bad cycles unless we see the whole system of how problems occur and then change the structure that create the problems.

Shared Vision: Forget work-life balance. Think work-life integration. Know why the work you are doing is important to you. Transform your work and workplace to create a learning organization where everyone strives to accomplish a shared vision. That vision sounds idealistic, but it is more realistic than trying to lead two separate lives-work and home.

The Fifth Discipline contains some great concepts which are very usable in the day to day management of an organization.

Unfortunately, the author is very long-winded and over-explains concepts repeatedly - taking what should have been less than 50 pages of information and turning it into a 400 page behemoth that is difficult to slog through.

Several people to whom I have recommended this book have suggested that one order the fieldbook instead, as it contains all of the original work's raw information and models in a 17 page executive summary at the beginning. Most people seem to find that more usable than this book.

The Fifth Discipline is a seminal book by the famous author Peter M. Senge. The book teaches the concept of the learning organization namely that the successful organization must continually adapt and learn in order to respond to changes in the environment effectively and therefore to grow and prosper. I have read the book a number of times and keep on referring to it as is filled with a lot useful knowledge and wisdom. System thinking and learning is critical to organisational growth and development in the present highly dynamic operating environment.

According to Peter Senge, "real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning"--powerful advice indeed from a real learning guru.

This revised and updated edition includes the thoughts and ideas of some successful practitioners, taking into account developments since the first edition was published about 15 years earlier. Do not be intimidated by the length of the book, over 450 pages, as it is very informative, insightful and interesting to read.

I recommend this book for individuals interested in understanding the nature of how organizations develop, how behaviours are formed, and how organizations achieve growth and augment their capabilities. You will learn how to improve the way your organization or department functions, how to review and improve systems and how to develop shared visions, create long term goals among other critical insights.

I must admit that I was doing research, and I have come to love the Kindle because it does such a nice job of cutting and pasting, pasting the citation along with the text. Imagine my surprise when I found that Amazon had disabled the feature "Due to publisher's restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." So being on a Kindle, I can't print it. I can only highlight it and bookmark it (and I can't even skip from bookmark to bookmark. I would have been better off buying the paper copy and using "Post-IT" notes. Amazon, also doesn't warn in advance about the publisher restrictions on copy like they do for if text to speech is enabled or not. Also, I have heard about books being able to "search inside the book". I would like to know on my Kindle, where that is enabled as well. But that is not highlighted either.

Systems thinking is vital for success in business in and life. Anyone in an organization or leadership position can observe the ripple effects across board from a seemingly simple event. Mr Senge does provide some good pointers and lessons in The Fifth Discipline to understand particular systems. Unfortunately, and most tragically, his explanations to their nature are so weak that he does a tremendous disservice to this new science. I would recommend this book only on the condition that one read Appendix 2 for the archetypes models and chapters 17 and 18.

I could write a hundred page essay on the good and bad points of this book. Instead, I will focus on the fundamental error: this is philosophical topic - which the author implicility acknowledges - without a consistent philosophy to back it up. By philosophical, I refer to epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Systems thinking is the conceptual means of observing the interrelationships among actions and phenomena. To explain this, Mr. Senge falls back on a hodgpodge of philosophies, all meshed together, each to rationalize his work. To the layman of philosophy, his work sounds complex and esoteric; to those familiar, confusing and mostly contradictory. Basically, he tries to "prove" an objective, scientific process, such as systems, using empircal data with mysticism (knowledge by a non-objective means or process). Systems are, more or less, a series of sequential logical effects initiated from a cause. Reading Senge, he portays them as some autonomous Hegelian archetype floating around, dominating people and process. The reason we do not see systems is because, according to him, western thought is "linear" (no satisfactory explanation is provided for how and why). Expecting us to agree with him, he moves forward by answering the next logical question: How are we then to understand systems? Through eastern mysticism (Senge is very sympathetic to Buddhism). In other words, we must rely on a system of ideas which is openly hostile to logic, this worldly knowledge, and especially individualism and materialism. This is very strange considering business is grounded in those very things.

Ironically, Senge is a self-proclaimed pragmatist (this comes from an interview he did after this book). Pragmatism is a western philosophy which states certainty is impossible, nothing is absolute, and what is true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow. He ascribes the West's deficiency in system thinking due to its the short-range, concrete bound mentality, i.e. those who only see "snapshots" of life. Believe it or not, this is the very epistemology which pragmatism promotes! It should be then no surprise he rarely defines any of his terms. He substitutes objective definitions for barrages of concrete bound examples.

Had Senge realized that systems thinking even applies to the field of ideas, in particulary philosophy, he might have recognized his contradictions, such as interpreting an objective science with mystical lens, and condemning western ideas despite being its very product. However, since he is a pragmatist, and only concerned with "current reality" (a phenomena which he speaks of multiple times and does not define), contradictions are not an issue. All this is presented in an unnecessarily long, confusing, and tedious book.

An all time great work that is timeless. Truly breakthrough and a must read although not an easy read. Prepare to spend some time with Peter and his insightful thinking about what really is important in organizations. His thinking may be foreign in today's business world which is too bad.
Gil

After having read this book, i found that i started to realized things pertaining to systems more deeply. The beer game is a great example of how people do not think about the system as a whole. each player of the game is only worried about themselves, and getting their orders in, they dont think about why their orders aret coming in or why people are buying so much beer. Everyone starts to think that someone is screwing up and not filling their orders and so on, however the lesson is to show that no one is screwing up, that there is a problem with the system or structure of the system. The other part of the book I enjoyed was the discipline about mental models. Interpreting what was said differently from what you think they wanted to say. For the rest o the disciplines, the shared vision and team learning is vital for any company or organization to succeed. I recommend this book to any Business or Industrial Engineer, the lessons learned in this book will help you to better relate to real life situations and get you to think beyond what the present situation is. Great read!

Good book, nice reading, however, the topic of the learning organization and this book is Senge's fruitless effort to get back in the wagon and try to reinvent himself with an updated version of the original book. If you have read or own the original book, do yourself a favor and do not waste your money with this updated version.

The Fifth Discipline by Dr. Peter Senge is a great book to teach you how to better communicate as a team. I believe that it is slightly aimed towards engineering type people if not for content then due to the fact that Dr. Peter Senge is an important figure in the engineering field. This book teaches concepts which can be very useful in an organization.
Dr. Senge uses some of his personal experiences to help explain the five disciplines; systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. I feel that one of the best examples is the beer game. The point of the beer game is to show how a system that doesn't communicate well within itself fails. There are three players; the retailer, the wholesaler, and the brewery. When the demand increases for the retailer and his stock is all being bought he goes and orders more beer than normal from the wholesaler, some beer to replenish his stock and some extra to sell due to the increased demand. In turn, when the wholesaler inventory starts to deplete do to the increase he then starts ordering even more beer than normal from the brewery. This seems like common sense, but what the players don't realize is that there are waiting periods for the beer to be make it from the brewery to the wholesaler to the retailer and finally to the customer. The problem is that when the brewery is finally caught up on all of the orders and sends it to the wholesaler the demand has stopped from the retailer due to the lack of inventory on hand for so long. The wholesaler is now stuck with mass amounts of a beer that is no longer in demand from the retailer. The conclusion is that the lack of communication between the three players causes a major problem for all three players. I realize that this may seem confusing but the book explains it very well.
The one drawback of the book is that Senge is very long winded. There is quite a bit of repeating and reinforcing that I feel goes overboard. The book could be much shorter and concise if his thoughts were more organized.