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ryansloan 's review for:
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization
by Peter M. Senge
The core ideas behind this book are interesting, but ultimately it failed to meet my (admittedly lofty) expectations. The framework Senge defines for creating/understanding learning organizations (using the five "disciplines") is thoughtful and coherent. He defines the five disciplines as:
1) Systems Thinking - Break free of linear cause-and-effect thinking and recognize the complex, interrelated forces at work. This is the "Fifth Discipline" referenced in the title, though Senge always discusses it first. I thought the book was going to spend a lot more time on this than it did.
2) Personal Mastery - Senge uses "Personal Mastery" to mean being committed to lifelong learning through reflection, patience, and working to see objective reality clearly.
3) Mental Models - Be explicit about your mental models (what are your assumptions? What is your understanding of the system at work?) and work to establish this as a cultural norm within your organization.
4) Building Shared Vision - Go beyond the fluffy vision statement, and describe "pictures of the future" that your organization can rally behind and strive toward. Profit or market dominance isn't a sustainable shared vision.
5) Team Learning - Use dialogue to communicate openly about all the disciplines above. Senge distinguishes between dialogue, or collectively getting at the truth, and discussion, or defending your point-of-view.
All of this seems to be genuinely good advice. I appreciated the overview of these topics, and the informal writing style the author used to describe what could have been a very dry subject. The author is thorough (more on this in the next paragraph), and the second appendix ("Systems Archetypes") is a useful overview of many common patterns in systems thinking.
My primary complaint about this book is a big one: it is that it needs a new editor. This is evident in small details (numerous typos and formatting issues, including all-caps, large type section headings that are misspelled) as well as in the organization and content of the book - it's waaaay too long for its content. The author repeats himself too much, and the stories used as examples can be rambling and redundant. The edition I have is the "revised and updated" version, and on the cover it says "revised and updated with 100 new pages." I don't know what the original edition was like, but I think perhaps they should have removed 100 pages when revising rather than adding.
If you're a reader with little or no background in systems thinking or reflective management, and are looking for a book explaining systems-oriented business management strategies, this might be a good introduction.
1) Systems Thinking - Break free of linear cause-and-effect thinking and recognize the complex, interrelated forces at work. This is the "Fifth Discipline" referenced in the title, though Senge always discusses it first. I thought the book was going to spend a lot more time on this than it did.
2) Personal Mastery - Senge uses "Personal Mastery" to mean being committed to lifelong learning through reflection, patience, and working to see objective reality clearly.
3) Mental Models - Be explicit about your mental models (what are your assumptions? What is your understanding of the system at work?) and work to establish this as a cultural norm within your organization.
4) Building Shared Vision - Go beyond the fluffy vision statement, and describe "pictures of the future" that your organization can rally behind and strive toward. Profit or market dominance isn't a sustainable shared vision.
5) Team Learning - Use dialogue to communicate openly about all the disciplines above. Senge distinguishes between dialogue, or collectively getting at the truth, and discussion, or defending your point-of-view.
All of this seems to be genuinely good advice. I appreciated the overview of these topics, and the informal writing style the author used to describe what could have been a very dry subject. The author is thorough (more on this in the next paragraph), and the second appendix ("Systems Archetypes") is a useful overview of many common patterns in systems thinking.
My primary complaint about this book is a big one: it is that it needs a new editor. This is evident in small details (numerous typos and formatting issues, including all-caps, large type section headings that are misspelled) as well as in the organization and content of the book - it's waaaay too long for its content. The author repeats himself too much, and the stories used as examples can be rambling and redundant. The edition I have is the "revised and updated" version, and on the cover it says "revised and updated with 100 new pages." I don't know what the original edition was like, but I think perhaps they should have removed 100 pages when revising rather than adding.
If you're a reader with little or no background in systems thinking or reflective management, and are looking for a book explaining systems-oriented business management strategies, this might be a good introduction.