The Learning Organization

Peter Michael Senge was born in 1947, he is an American scientist. Senge received a B.S. in Aerospace engineering from Stanford University. While at Stanford, Senge also studied philosophy. He later earned an M.S. in social systems modeling from MIT in 1972. He also earned a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1978 (Wikipedia, 2011).

He was the Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and as of 2005 was on the faculty at MIT.

He is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). This organization helps with the communication of ideas between large corporations. It replaced the previous organization known as, The center for Organizational Learning at MIT.

He has had a regular meditation practice since 1996 and began meditating with a trip to Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery, before attending Stanford. He recommends meditation or similar forms of contemplative practice (Wikipedia, 2011).

Aside from writing The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990), Peter Senge has also co-authored a number of other books linked to the themes first developed in The Fifth Discipline. These include The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994); The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999) and his latest Schools That Learn in the year 2000 (Smith, 2001).

Critique:

The article begins with Senge stating that he believes that in today’s organizations there are five new component technologies that provide a different dimension that can build to learning organizations. As stated by author Michael Marquardt:

Four main forces h...

... middle of paper ...

... perceived limits. In learning organizations, everyone's opinions are valued and the amount that people can contribute is not always determined by position in the organization.

Works Cited

Kleiner, A. (1995). Why a learning organization. Retrieved March 5, 2011 from Web site

http://world.std.com/~lo/WhyLO.html

Marquardt, M. J. (2002). Building the Learning Organization (2nd ed.). Palo Alto, CA:

Consulting Psychologists Press.

Senge, P.M. (1990). The Learning Organization. Classics of Organizational Behavior, 468-472.

Reprinted from The Fifth Discipline.

Smith, M. K. (2001). Peter Senge and the learning organization, the encyclopedia of informal

education, Retrieved March 5, 2011 from Web site: www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm

Wikipedia (Jan., 2011). Peter M. Senge. Retrieved on March 5, 2011 from Web site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Senge