The Fifth Discipline

29/05/2009 by Simon Tomey.

by Peter M. Senge See this book on Amazon »“Metanoia” - a shift of mind. Some great ideas in this book and the one I love the most is systematic thinking.

• Senge explains that while we are in the habit of understanding life as separate events which happen to us, the reality is that systems in life are interconnected, often in a (delayed) feedback loop.
  • Good results come only come from persevering with responsibility and foresight in the context of delayed feedback
    (”what goes around comes around”, and the short term results might be misleading).
  • Perhaps a warning against chosing the cost advantages of outsourcing business processes and ignoring the crippling cost to the business of dis-integration.
• In “Personal Mastery” Senge introduces
  • how we should develop more comprehensive view of issues by being aware of our fixation with our own perspective and
  • how we can harness the power of the emotional and rational intelligence to benefit from the understanding of others.
  • a great outline of many of the ideas now classed as “NLP” or emotional intelligence.”
• I love the fact that this book was written 19 years ago, but many of the ideas are currently touted as a novelty.

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