Ankit Mehta

Dhanashree Limaye

Harish Mohan

Abhishek Kumar

Himaja Manda

Siddhartha Lodha

PGDM – A

Book Review

Peter M. Senge

Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management

Senior Lecturer at MIT

Director of the Centre for Organizational Learning at MIT

In 1997, Harvard Business Review identified The Fifth Discipline as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. 

For this work, he was named by Journal of Business Strategy as the 'Strategist of the Century'.

What is the book about ?

A Learning Organization “an organization where people continually 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”

Learning Disabilities• I am my position

• The enemy is out there

• The illusion of taking charge

• The fixation on events

• The parable of the boiled frog

• The delusion of learning from experience

• The myth of the management team

• Prisoners of our Thinking

The laws of fifth discipline

• Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions.“

• The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.

• Behaviour grows better before it grows worse.

• The easy way out usually leads back in.

• The cure can be worse than the disease.

The laws of fifth discipline(contd.)

• Faster is slower.

• Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

• Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

• You can have your cake and eat it too—but not at once.

• Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

• There is no blame.

The core disciplines

Personal mastery 

Mental Models

Shared Vision

Team learning

Prototype learning organizations

Challenges :•the internal politics and game playing•distribute business responsibility widely and still retain coordination and control•War between work and family

Techniques to overcome these challenges :•Openness•Localness•Practice the five disciplines of a Learning Organization

A new view of leadership

In a learning organization, a leader serves as a :•Designer•Steward•Teacher     

Takeaways• Continuous learning

• Always think of the big picture

• Mastery of Creative tension

• Always stick to the vision

Comments about the book• Interesting but sometimes hard to read

• Topics explored from different points of view

• Unbiased opinions

• Interesting perspective to leadership

Rating