The fifth discipline

...is an excellent book by Peter Senge. It's subtitled The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Surprisingly few adults work to rigorously develop their own personal mastery.

More often than we realize systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals' mistakes.

Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole.

In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is both a cause and an effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction.

One of the highest leverage points for improving system performance, is the minimization of system delays.

Learning is eventually always about action.

The total absence of meaningful practice or rehearsal is probably the predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being effective learning units.

No practice, no learning.

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

Most organizations are dominated by linear thinking, not systems thinking. The dominance of the event mentality tells people that the name of the game is reacting to change, not generating change.

It cannot be stressed too much that team learning is a team skill.

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool the use of which leads them to think differently [Buckminster Fuller].

Sensing and acting locally is exactly how complex living systems work.

Hierarchy is antithetical to dialogue, and it is difficult to escape hierarchy in organisations.