The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a major figure in organizational development, presents executives ways to build learning organizations as he regards the organization’s ability to learn as the absolute competitive advantage. The core principles in the book have been now adopted into business practices of many leading organizations since the book was published.

The book offers ways to create learning organizations, which will eliminate certain elements that hamper companies productivity and success. Readers will be able to expect re-energized employees eager to continuously learn what is necessary to deliver results, an ability to see the big picture as well as details, and a teamwork-driven innovation among others by following the author’s suggested disciplines as discussed in the book:

• Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively
• Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action
• Building shared vision- a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance
• Team learning starts with dialogue, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine thinking together
• Systems thinking- the fifth discipline that integrates the other four