I'm in education and we tend to have a professional disdain for anything coming out of the business world. I understand that disdain and largely sympathize with it from an ideological perspective, but on a practical level, we are missing out on some really tremendous works. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is certainly one of these books.

Sure the book is verbose and tends to make its points ad nauseam, but there's some great discussions about leadership here. In sum, Senge encourages us to take a systems approach to organizations -- we need to look at organizations in their full context rather than through our narrow perspectives. This will allow us to see the best paths we need to take in order to success. The best way to achieve this is to create learning communities where we work, i.e., places where ideas are taken seriously and exchanged and debated on a regular basis.

The book is full of learned references to philosophy (Western and Eastern) and literature. For me, this went a long way toward dispelling the stereotype of the one-dimensional businessperson, obsessed only with profit. Nothing in the book seemed all that revolutionary to me but when I thought about that, I realized that's because so much of this book has been used in so many different conversations I've had about leadership, that Senge's ideas have become intellectual common knowledge. ( )

This is the best business book ever written. A very wise book, there is far more going on here than just organizational behavior. This is a life philosophy. The court learning dilemma ""we can't learn it when we see no consequences of our actions"" area did highly significant info set. Also, the Truevision versus the vision statement, the danger of best practices, visions fail without systems thinking, the concept of compensating feedback -- why what I refer to as 'the Heiser uncertainty principle' occurs, ""too much information"" as a fundamental problem, why can't work be one of the wonderful things of life, conflict manipulation describes the use of any ""negative vision"" as a motivator, entire industries can develop misfits between models and reality, why visions die, the boundary between work and life is artificial. ( )

This is a classic and remains relevant today. It was not real news to me, but was instead deeply validating. ( )

For me