13 Posts found for Author: Peter Senge

There’s an element […] that is completely disregarded in formal management education. We’re supposed to figure things out. We’re supposed to make the machine work and correct problems when they come up. But, in fact, in creating something, a lot of the most important developments are what you didn’t expect. And it’s how you recognize and deal with surprise. It’s a very different mindset. The … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subjects: Education, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management

While many executives acknowledge the need for leaders at every level of the organization, they rarely manage the enterprise as if those leaders existed. They fall into a trap that has become embedded in our language; they confuse rank with leadership. The belief that the leaders are only those with executive titles and corner offices serves to reinforce the lack of initiative, enterprise, and entrepreneurship … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

It’s easy to bash corporate hierarchy. Hierarchical authority as it has traditionally functioned is the authority of compliance—and compliance won’t get you far in today’s fluid, fickle marketplace. But hierarchy still has important functions, especially if we can learn to recognize its limitations and to adapt it to the changing nature of leadership.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

From both a practical and theoretical standpoint, senior executives are expected to provide insight and vision about how the world is evolving over the next 10 to 30 years. But Americans probably have less sense of history than almost any culture on the planet and we seem to be, if anything, hell-bent on having even less sense of history. Understanding the past is yet another … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Future, History

People tend to internalize an organization’s culture, which for senior managers can mean internalizing a hierarchical culture of compliance rather than an inclusive culture of shared learning. So the people who will have the most difficulty in changing may be the most senior people, for two reasons: they’ve been around the longest, and they have been selected by the system as exemplars of what the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Structure influences behavior. When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

In many ways, the Industrial Age has been an age of exploitation—not just of natural resources but of whole peoples.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

The history of leadership theory started with an emphasis on traits – the notion that it is the make-up of the leader that makes all the difference. This paper brief seeks to provide a framework that allows us to integrate prior leadership theories, while focusing on what leaders actually do. It is a framework that views leadership as a capacity that both individuals and groups … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Deborah Ancona, Peter Senge, Tom Malone, Wanda Orlikowski | Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | Subject: Leadership

Johnson and Broms, cost management experts and coauthors of Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, present a case for “management by means (MBM),” not “management by results (MBR),” thinking. MBM espouses the universal principles of living systems, i.e., nature, as relevant to all enterprises; the way work is organized must be guided by the principles of living systems. Seven chapters cover the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Anders Broms, H. Thomas Johnson, Peter Senge | Subjects: Accounting, Management

Peter M. Senge offers an excellent look at Peter Drucker’s discipline of innovation (focus on mission, define significant results, and do rigorous assessment), providing along the way some of the best comments about mission and vision that I have ever read.

Content: Article | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

New strategies for learning on the job, meeting colleagues’ expectations, and asking the right questions.

Content: Article | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

Content: Book | Authors: Betty S. Flowers, Joseph Jaworski, Peter Senge | Subject: Leadership

Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a “learning organization” that used “systems thinking” as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy. He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released in 1990, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Peter Senge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior