Best Business Books #7--The Fifth Discipline

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (Doubleday, 2006) stands as a theoretical breakthrough by Senge, the director of MIT’s Center for Organizational Learning. He posits that all successful organizations must be “learningful” and that it’s not enough for just one person or even several to be concerned with lifelong learning, but the entire company needs to have learning at the forefront. And there are 5 disciplines associated with organizational learning: Systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision, and team learning. Senge was the researcher who added systems thinking to organizational learning to make it accessible to real leaders and managers, working in real companies.