The Fifth Discipline is quite an impressive book. It introduces the art of "organizational learning," which is the ability of a large group to learn and adapt. It is not sufficient for individuals in the group to learn; the entire group must learn, or its competitive advantage and survival are at risk.

This art is broken down into five main groups, or disciplines:

1. Personal Mastery: Individuals should set personal growth goals, and the organization must help them achieve them... even if that increases the risk of losing that individual
2. Mental Models: People need to understand what assumptions they are making about the system, and the people within it. Our observations may be 100% correct, but our judgments are frequently wrong.
3. Shared Vision: Empowering people will lead to disaster unless there is a true vision that binds the group together. Don't mistake a mission statement for shared vision: they're not even close.
4. Team Learning: You must have rules to encourage useful "dialog" and discourage useless "discussion". Make sure your teams feel safe to submit their opinions, so the optimal solution can be reached via consensus.
5. Systems Thinking: The Fifth Discipline, and what pulls everything together. You need to step away from the current problem and take a big picture view to see feedback loops, cause-and-effect delays, and other side-effects of system events. These are what turn small mistakes into huge problems... or small changes into huge benefits.

This second edition includes interesting anecdotes... for example, both the Total Quality Management movement and the Society for Organizational Learning made big waves when introduced, but very few people successfully put the theory into practice. Why? The author argues that our educational system is too insistent that there is always a "right" solution to every problem... and this is the solution that makes the teacher/boss happy.

As long as the teacher is always "right", and the boss is always "right," and we'll be completely blind to new ideas. What we need is new perspectives so we can design and implement more effective solutions. Frequently, the most optimal solution is doing the exact opposite of what the boss told you to do. Of course, doing this frequently gets you an F, or a poor performance review, so only the fearless can get away with it.

Sadly, I doubt these ideas make serious inroads into academia or the private sector without a massive retraining program... but I admire Senge for trying!