Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline is far more than what it's advertised as, a mere "business book". It's really a quick course in how to think more effectively, individually and in concert with others. Senge identifies what's important as:

• systems thinking — understanding how complex nonlinear behavior arises from feedback loops (positive and negative), sources, sinks, delays, and perturbations ... in other words, developing gut-level intuition about sets of coupled differential equations (!)
• team learning — understanding how people work together in groups to solve big problems
• mental modeling — understanding how to build and use thought-experiments, and thereby how to gain knowledge from virtual experience
• shared vision — understanding how to identify and focus with others on large-scale long-range goals
• personal mastery — understanding how to think about what's genuinely important in one's own philosophy, and thereby how to live

So maybe The Fifth Discipline is a business book — about the business of life.

See also ^zhurnal entries of 11 May 1999 ("TransientBehavior"), 29 April 1999 ("BennettOnStoicism"), and 30 May 1999 ("My Business").

Sunday, September 10, 2000 at 20:43:56 (EDT) = 2000-09-10

TopicThinking - TopicOrganizations

(correlates: WakeUpCall, AllSunsets, SeverePrivilege, ...)