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Title: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
ISBN: 0385517254
Author:
Peter M. Senge
Publicate Date: 2006-03-21
Publish: 2006-03-21
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $14.20
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $12.28
Amazon Merchant Price: $16.47
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Excellent book on systemic thinking in business context
An inspired book on management that puts people really at the center of the stage. From a methodological point of view broad use of System Thinking as a practical tool to interpret reality.
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2: Systemic thinking: the art of thinking in loops...
I won this book in a lottery and it was on my bookshelf for several years. I thought it would be one of those repetitive bestsellers about management and leadership, so common in this genre. Belonging to this genre, this book could not escape its being repetitive, but the content far outweighed this minor flaw. It was mainly about systemic thinking or systems theory, which is the 5th discipline. I had read about systemic thinking (in a text book by Adalberto Chiavenato), but very superficially. Chiavenato only made the reference that organizations are systems similar to living organisms, in the sense that they interact with their environment.
In this book you can find the main structures of systems that scientists have discovered, exemplified with good metaphors and helpful drawings and diagrams:
Self-reassuring growth loops (snow ball effect), growth loops combined with a restraining loop of limitation of resources, restriction loops combined with a mitigation loop, in which symptoms are attacked instead of the root cause, thereby undermining the organization's ability to detect and react to the real problem. In reality several of these loops combine to produce more complex systems and when you add the effect of time, meaning when a delay occurs between the cause and its effect, the cause can get really difficult to grasp. The book explains you the mechanisms behind these loops and how to react once you have discovered them. The only shortcoming of the book is that it does not help you to detect them, it only says that you need practice, ok but where or how to start? Maybe the handbook offers some training examples.
The first four disciplines are not new in management literature and although the chapters on systems thinking are a perfect introduction to the topic, I felt the knowledge on systems thinking that this book transmitted me was still not deep enough. I will try to find more literature on the topic, but I highly recommend this book as a very good start.
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3: A poorly written and contradictory case for systems thinking.
Systems thinking is vital for success in business in and life. Anyone in an organization or leadership position can observe the ripple effects across board from a seemingly simple event. Mr Senge does provide some good pointers and lessons in The Fifth Discipline to understand particular systems. Unfortunately, and most tragically, his explanations to their nature are so weak that he does a tremendous disservice to this new science. I would recommend this book only on the condition that one read Appendix 2 for the archetypes models and chapters 17 and 18.
I could write a ten page essay on the good and bad points of this book. Instead, I will focus on the fundamental error: this is philosophical topic - which the author implicility acknowledges - without a consistent philosophy to back it up. By philosophical, I refer to epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Systems thinking is the conceptual means of observing the interrelationships among actions and phenomena. To explain this, Mr. Senge falls back on a hodgpodge of philosophies, all meshed together, each to rationalize his work. To the layman of philosophy, his work sounds complex and esoteric; to those familiar, confusing and mostly contradictory. Basically, he tries to "prove" an objective, scientific process, such as systems, using empircal data with mysticism (knowledge by a non-objective means or process). Systems are, more or less, a series of sequential logical effects initiated from a cause. Reading Senge, he portays them as some autonomous Hegelian archetype floating around, dominating people and process. The reason we do not see systems is because, according to him, western thought is "linear" (no satisfactory explanation is provided for how and why). Expecting us to agree with him, he moves forward by answering the next logical question: How are we then to understand systems? Through eastern mysticism (Senge is very sympathetic to Buddhism). In other words, we must rely on a system of ideas which is openly hostile to logic, this worldly knowledge, and especially individualism and materialism. This is very strange considering business is grounded in those very things.
Ironically, Senge is a self-proclaimed pragmatist (this comes from an interview he did after this book). Pragmatism is a western philosophy which states certainty is impossible, nothing is absolute, and what is true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow. He ascribes the West's deficiency in system thinking due to its the short-range, concrete bound mentality, i.e. those who only see "snapshots" of life. Believe it or not, this is the very epistemology which pragmatism promotes! It should be then no surprise he rarely defines any of his terms. He substitutes objective definitions for barrages of concrete bound examples.
Had Senge realized that systems thinking even applies to the field of ideas, in particulary philosophy, he might have recognized his contradictions, such as interpreting an objective science with mystical lens, and condemning western ideas despite being its very product. However, since he is a pragmatist, and only concerned with "current reality" (a phenomena which he speaks of multiple times and does not define), contradictions are not an issue. All this is presented in an unnecessarily long, confusing, and tedious book.
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4: Bunch of unstructured good concepts
The book indeed brings some refreshing observations on the topic of the learning organization. However, on the very beginning of my reading I had an impression that the Author came up to most of the conclusions in this book through meditation. This aura is covering the complete book. There are a lot of nice ideas and comments but it is very blur for understanding. I would say, that structuring of the chapters themselves was not done in the best possible way. This book would have a nice potential and could have gained a much broader audience if it was written in a more comprehensible way. For example third discipline "Mental models" should be a part of a first discipline "Personal Mastery" and not a separate one.
What the Author is trying to explain is that organization is like a mathematical function. If you influence on one of the function variables, function will give a different result. Therefore you should be very careful before making any decisions significant for the organization. Sort of an Organizational process engineering if you ask me, but in some abstract form.
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5: The Sixth Discipline
The Fifth Discipline contains some great concepts which are very usable in the day to day management of an organization.
Unfortunately, the author is very long-winded and over-explains concepts repeatedly - taking what should have been less than 50 pages of information and turning it into a 400 page behemoth that is difficult to slog through.
Several people to whom I have recommended this book have suggested that one order the fieldbook instead, as it contains all of the original work's raw information and models in a 17 page executive summary at the beginning. Most people seem to find that more usable than this book.
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