What We’re Reading: Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline
March 1, 2017
Peter Senge’s classic, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, continues to offer us inspiration and guidance in our quality improvement work. We are hard-pressed to find any other book that does a better job exploring and explaining the personal aspect of being a systems leader, or illustrating how critical it is to consider the personal when thinking about systems. In Senge’s model, decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations enhances the ability of employees to work productively toward common goals. But decentralizing leadership to build more sustainable enterprise requires managerial and institutional changes. Senge’s work articulates a cornerstone position of human values in the workplace: namely, that vision, purpose, reflectiveness, and systems thinking are essential if organizations are to realize their potential. Senge is a keynote speaker at our 2017 Summit on Improvement.