Peter Michael Senge (b.1947) is an American business theorist and academician specializing in organizational development. He is celebrated for his bestselling The Fifth Discipline (1990,) a treatise on systems thinking, organizational learning, and knowledge management.
Born in Stanford, California, Senge graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering and a master’s degree in social systems modeling and a PhD from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.)
Senge is a revolutionary systems scientist and teaches at the Sloan School and the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning dedicated to the “interdependent development of people and their institutions.”
In addition to The Fifth Discipline, Senge is the author of Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (2004) and The Necessary Revolution: Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (2008.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Peter Senge
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
—Peter Senge
Topics: Sin, Vision, Mastery, Patience, Yin
We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.
—Peter Senge
It is our experience that, 90% of the time, what passes for commitment is compliance.
—Peter Senge
People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them—in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. The do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
—Peter Senge
Topics: Learning, Life, Work, People, Results, Mastery
Vision paints the picture of what we want to create. Systems thinking reveals how we have created what we currently have.
—Peter Senge
A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power… Shared vision is vital for the learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning.
—Peter Senge
Topics: Memory
Learning organizations are possible because not only is it our nature to learn but we love to learn.
—Peter Senge
Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.
—Peter Senge
The entire global business community is learning to learn together, becoming a learning community.
—Peter Senge
I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “great person”.
—Peter Senge
Topics: Yin, Greatness, Try, Believe
Learning organizations may be a tool not just for the evolution of organizations, but for the evolution of intelligence.
—Peter Senge
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