Peter Senge Quotes

#1. There's a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.

Peter Senge

#2. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.

Peter Senge

#3. Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the "rubber stamp meets the road"; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.

Peter Senge

#4. In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.

Peter Senge

#5. The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems.

Peter Senge

#6. When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Peter Senge

#7. A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.

Peter Senge

#8. Knowledge is constructed, not transferred

Peter Senge

#9. When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders.

Peter Senge

#10. The easy way out usually leads back in.

Peter Senge

#11. Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.

Peter Senge

#12. Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

Peter Senge

#13. The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

Peter Senge

#14. In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually.

Peter Senge

#15. In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive.

Peter Senge

#16. Perhaps for the first time in history, human-kind has the capacity to create far more information than anyone can absorb; to foster far greater interdependency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyone's ability to keep pace.

Peter Senge

#17. Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success.

Peter Senge

#18. The discipline of personal mastery ... starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us (and) living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.

Peter Senge

#19. When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible - and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important.

Peter Senge

#20. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

Peter Senge

#21. If you want real, significant, sustainable change, you need talented, committed local line leaders. If the line manager is not innovating, then innovation is not going to occur.

Peter Senge

#22. It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear.

Peter Senge

#23. 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

#24. How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.

Peter Senge

#25. I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?

Peter Senge

#26. You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy.

Peter Senge

#27. When there is genuine vision(as opposed to the all-too-familiar vision statement), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.

Peter Senge

#28. If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout - and a lot of the political clout, frankly - is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation.

Peter Senge

#29. A unique relationship develops among team members who enter into dialogue regularly. They develop a deep trust that cannot help but carry over to discussions. They develop a richer understanding of the uniqueness of each person's point of view.

Peter Senge

#30. An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.

Peter Senge

#31. The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members' awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform.

Peter Senge

#32. Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

Peter Senge

#33. Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress.

Peter Senge

#34. In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality.

Peter Senge

#35. Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.

Peter Senge

#36. The faster we go, the slower we need to be.

Peter Senge

#37. If there is genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance and evaluating whether capacity to meet potential demand is adequate.

Peter Senge

#38. When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results, but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

Peter Senge

#39. The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

Peter Senge

#40. Team learning is the Process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members desire. It builds on the discipline of developing a shared vision. It also builds on personal mastery, for talented teams are made up of talented individuals.

Peter Senge

#41. In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

Peter Senge

#42. Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique.

Peter Senge

#43. We need to be the authors of our own life.

Peter Senge

#44. Many children struggle in schools ... because the way they are being taught is incompatible with the way they learn.

Peter Senge

#45. All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift.

Peter Senge

#46. Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

Peter Senge

#47. Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.

Peter Senge

#48. Personal mastery teaches us to choose. Choosing is a courageous act: picking the results and actions which you will make into your destiny.

Peter Senge

#49. 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

#50. Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in some way isn't bad ... We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being.

Peter Senge

#51. We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.

Peter Senge

#52. Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.

Peter Senge

#53. 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

#54. A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.

Peter Senge

#55. Learning organizations organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

Peter Senge

#56. The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

Peter Senge

#57. You cannot have a learning organisation without a shared vision ... A shared vision provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops.

Peter Senge

#58. Learning cannot be disassociated from action.

Peter Senge

#59. Don't push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.

Peter Senge

#60. In the absence of a great dream pettiness prevails. Shred visions foster risk taking, courage and innovation. Keeping the end in mind creates the confidence to make decisions even in moments of crisis.

Peter Senge

#61. One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier.

Peter Senge

#62. In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.

Peter Senge

#63. If people don't have their own vision, all they can do is 'sign-up' for someone else's.

Peter Senge

#64. The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

Peter Senge

#65. When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart.

Peter Senge

#66. Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

Peter Senge

#67. Many in positions of authority lack the capabilities to truly lead. They are not credible. They do not command genuine respect. They are not committed to serve. They are not continually learning and growing. They are not wise.

Peter Senge

#68. The capacity of a human community to shape it's future.

Peter Senge

#69. If you want to see the future of management education you should go to see Team Academy.

Peter Senge

#70. Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner.

Peter Senge

#71. Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.

Peter Senge

#72. A shared vision is not an idea ... it is rather, a force in people's hearts ... at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question 'What do we want to create?

Peter Senge

#73. The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.

Peter Senge

#74. We often spend so much time coping with problems along our path that we forget why we are on that path in the first place. The result is that we only have a dim, or even inaccurate, view of what's really important to us.

Peter Senge

#75. The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.

Peter Senge

#76. I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.

Peter Senge