• Title: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
• Author: Peter M. Senge
• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Currency (March 21, 2006)
• ISBN: 0385517254

To set some perspective…. I’ve asked my team to read a book about either banking or business about every two months. We started with Execution; one team member told me that was not practical enough (!) so the next book I picked was Getting Things Done. A member of my team suggested this book – he hadn’t read it but the review he read made it sound really good. Since that’s often how I pick business books to read, I agreed and put this up for Nov. and Dec.

I got a copy and read it. Very useful book with a lot of good ideas, mostly around applying systems thinking to problems. The reviews spend a lot of time talking about creating a learning organization, and perhaps that’s what the author wanted to point out, but I think the book spends most of its time and effort showing how to apply systems thinking to problems.

That’s quite a good enough topic, and this book in my opinion delivers a lot.