Top 100 Senge Quotes
#1. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE
Daniel H. Pink
#2. Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.
Peter Senge
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift.
Peter Senge
#6. Many children struggle in schools ... because the way they are being taught is incompatible with the way they learn.
Peter Senge
#7. We need to be the authors of our own life.
Peter Senge
#8. 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
#9. People don't resist change. They resist being changed.
Peter M. Senge
#10. In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.
Peter Senge
#11. 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
#12. The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.
Peter Senge
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end
Peter M. Senge
#16. The faster we go, the slower we need to be.
Peter Senge
#17. 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
#18. In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality.
Peter Senge
#19. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life
Peter M. Senge
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Mastery of creative tension brings out the capacity for perseverance and patience. Time is an ally.
Peter M. Senge
#23. Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
Peter Senge
#24. 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
#25. How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing?
Peter M. Senge
#26. People with high levels of personal mastery ... cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.
Peter M. Senge
#27. A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.
Peter Senge
#28. Intuition eludes the grasp of linear thinking, with its exclusive emphasis on cause and effect that are close in time and space. The result is that most of our intuitions don't make sense - that is, they can't be explained in terms of linear logic. Very
Peter M. Senge
#29. 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
#30. Don't push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.
Peter Senge
#31. Learning cannot be disassociated from action.
Peter Senge
#32. The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition.
Peter M. Senge
#33. That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.
Peter M. Senge
#34. 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
#35. The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.
Peter Senge
#36. Great teachers create space for learning and invite people into that space.
Peter M. Senge
#37. alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult:
Peter M. Senge
#38. 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
#39. Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners.
Peter M. Senge
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. It took a scenario that he was going to die for Fred to wake up. It took that kind of shock for his life to be transformed. Maybe that's what needs to happen for all of us, for everyone who lives on Earth. That could be what a requiem scenario offers us.
Peter M. Senge
#43. 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
#44. We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.
Peter Senge
#45. Business and human endeavors are systems ... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.
Peter M. Senge
#46. We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system.
Peter M. Senge
#47. The world is made of Circles
And we think in straight Lines
Peter M. Senge
#48. leaders' work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization.
Peter M. Senge
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model.
Peter M. Senge
#53. 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
#54. A vision not consistent with values that people live by day by day will not only fail to inspire genuine enthusiasm, it will often foster outright cynicism. These
Peter M. Senge
#55. 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
#56. Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.
Peter Senge
#57. The easy way out usually leads back in.
Peter Senge
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Knowledge is constructed, not transferred
Peter Senge
#61. Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company's goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear.
Peter M. Senge
#62. 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
#63. If we cannot express our
assumptions explicitly in ways that
others can understand and build
upon, there can be no larger process
of testing those assumptions and
building public knowledge.
Peter M. Senge
#64. When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.
Peter Senge
#65. The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly
Peter M. Senge
#66. We need to learn the disciplines that will help cultivate the wisdom of the group and larger social systems.
Peter M. Senge
#67. Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo.
Peter M. Senge
#68. The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems.
Peter Senge
#70. People get used to having experts who can solve their problems for them; people can then easily lose motivation to develop their own capacities.
Peter M. Senge
#71. In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.
Peter Senge
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.
Peter Senge
#75. 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
#76. Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.
Peter M. Senge
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Breakthroughs come when people learn how to take the time to stop and examine their assumptions.
Peter M. Senge
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear.
Peter Senge
#87. When asked what they want, many adults will say what they want to get rid of.
Peter M. Senge
#88. Learning organizations are possible because, deep down, we are all learners. No one has to teach an infant to learn. In fact, no one has to teach infants anything. They are intrinsically inquisitive, masterful learners who learn to walk, speak, and pretty much run their households all on their own.
Peter M. Senge
#89. An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.
Peter Senge
#90. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
Peter Senge
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of parts within wholes. It is made up of wholes within wholes. All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary. We invent them and then, ironically, we find ourselves trapped within them. But
Peter M. Senge
#95. Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success.
Peter Senge
#96. 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
#97. In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive.
Peter Senge
#98. [ ... ] most of the problems faced by humankind concerns [concerned] our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world.
Peter M. Senge
#99. In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually.
Peter Senge
#100. It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced
Peter M. Senge
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