Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist – someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced.
All great things have small beginnings.
I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That’s a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.
A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.
Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision.
The key to success isn’t just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.
Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner.
The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.
Knowledge is constructed, not transferred.
Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.
The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.
The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.
The Industrial Age is not sustainable. Its not sustainable in ecological terms, and its not sustainable in human terms.