The Fifth Discipline Quotes

“the bad leader is he who the people despise; the good leader is he who the people praise; the great leader is he who the people say, "We did it ourselves”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“[...] vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“When young people develop basic leadership and collaborative learning skills, they can be a formidable force for change.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“the basic metaphor of prototypes still seems apt to me. There are no answers or magic pills. There is no alternative to learning through experimentation. Benchmarking and studying “best practices” will not suffice—because the prototyping process does not involve just incremental changes in established ways of doing things, but radical new ideas and practices that together create a new way of managing.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

“I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly,”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, “I just read a great book about bicycle riding—I’ve now learned that.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“In Chapter 8, I argued that personal vision, by itself, is not the key to releasing the energy of the creative process. The key is “creative tension,” the tension between vision and reality. The most effective people are those who can “hold” their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“I believe benchmarking best practices can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.” 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 M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“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. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“In fact, most of the time, things do not turn out as we expect. But the potential value of unexpected developments is rarely tapped. Instead, when things turn out contrary to our expectations, we go immediately into problem-solving mode and react, or just try harder—without taking the time to see whether this unexpected development is telling us something important about our assumptions. “This more prepared mental state is really where a lot of the longer-term payoff is,” says Galloway.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

“That is why the discipline of managing mental models—surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works—promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organizations.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

“Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“The committed person doesn’t play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

“When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that “someone screwed up.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“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. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“If managers focus only on short-term results, they are often justified in continuing to intervene to sustain results.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

“Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

“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. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout an organization carry.”
― Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization