The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
by Peter M. Senge
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter M. SengeEdition: Paperback
Published: 2006-03-21
ISBN: 0385517254
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Book Reviews of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Book Review: A poorly written and contradictory case for systems thinking.
Summary: 2 Stars
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 ten 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.
Summary of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Completely Updated and RevisedThis 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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