"The Fifth Discipline" revolutionized the practice of management by introducing the theory of learning organizations. Now, Dr Senge moves from the philosophical to the practical by answering the first question all lovers of the learning organization ask - what do they do on Monday morning?

This book is a pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the life-blood of every endeavour and where tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories in this book show that businesses, schools, agencies and even communities can undo their "learning disabilities" and achieve superior performance.

The book helps readers learn:

• why Royal Dutch/Shell now asks its managers,"What do you want on your epitaph?";
• how Ford Motor Company escaped from the measurement trap that threatens all quality initiatives;
• how Intel developed forms of "team learning" to dramatically cut cycle time and change their working relationship;
• how the 18,000 employees of the Australian Taxation Office took charge of their own learning to bust their tired, burdensome bureaucracy;
• why Du Pont uses a board game to understand the emotional element of plant maintenance problems;
• and how AT&T used the learning organization concept to begin its transformation from a corporation to a global community.

It isn't necessary to read the "The Fifth Discipline" to understand this book - summaries of Senge's key theoretical ideas are included in "The Fieldbook".

Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it’s like to operate under this system. The book’s concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever.

Peter Senge, founder and director of the Society for Organisational Learning and senior lecturer at MIT, has found the means of creating a ‘learning organisation’. In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nutured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts.

Mastering the disciplines will:

• Reignite the spark of learning, driven by people focused on what truly matters to them.
• Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity.
• Free you from confining assumptions and mind-sets.
• Teach you to see the forest and the trees.
• End the struggle between work and family time.

The Fifth Discipline is a remarkable book that draws on science, spiritual values, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought and Senge’s work with leading companies which employ Fifth Discipline methods. Reading it provides a searching personal experience and a dramatic professional shift of mind.

This edition contains more than 100 pages of new material about how companies are actually using and benefiting from Fifth Discipline practices, as well as a new foreword from Peter Senge about his work with the Fifth Discipline over the last 15 years.