The Fifth Discipline

Centres around systems thinking in the organisation, encouraging a more holistic view of the links between actions and outcomes. Provides some really useful models of the main types of interaction, and full of great case studies, meaning you can immediately reference the ideas here against the issues you'll be familiar with in your workplace. Slight niggle - in need of tighter editing to remove significant amout of fluff, which somewhat dilutes the book's impact.

150 pages of this book had me absolutely gripped. The beer game was fantastic and the description of the archetypes can immediately be seen in action at work. However the rest of the book was a bit of a snoozer for me, happy to get it out of the way. Towards the end, I skipped pages often because it was just wasting my time.

A book that's hard to stay focused on while your mind flits to your own real-life working experience upon reading the many ways system thinking can improve the way we strategize and work together. A bunch of this isn't new if you've read about cybernetics or system theory before, but I really enjoyed the segments on personal mastery and on shared vision. Both are such hard problems in this nonlinear world. It might not seem intuitive how to extrapolate from the more straightforward industry examples mentioned in the book, but what I take from this is, that it takes continuous analysis and reflection, and a long-term attitude. Inspiring!

Senge's five disciplines of learning organizations:
* Personal Mastery
* Mental Models
* Shared Vision
* Team learning
* Systems Thinking