Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Senge

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.

If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout - and a lot of the political clout, frankly - is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation.

There's a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.

Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress.

How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.

Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in some way isn't bad... We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being.

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we were never able to do.

When you ask people what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest.

If there is genuine potential for growth, build capacity in advance of demand, as a strategy for creating demand. Hold the vision, especially as regards assessing key performance and evaluating whether capacity to meet potential demand is adequate.

In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually.

Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.

Many in positions of authority lack the capabilities to truly lead. They are not credible. They do not command genuine respect. They are not committed to serve. They are not continually learning and growing. They are not wise.

In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models - that is, they are responsible for learning.

I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.

You cannot force commitment, what you can do…You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create.

When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart.

Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.

Leadership is about creating new realities.

Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo.

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning.

The world is made of Circles And we think in straight Lines

The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.

Don't push growth; remove the factors limiting growth.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person's behaviour. The prejudiced person can't see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holder

Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning.

In great teams conflict becomes productive.

The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.

In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred

All great things have small beginnings.

Learning is all about connections, and through our connections with unique people we are able to gain a true understanding of the world around us.

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.

We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.

Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great 'team', a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way-who trusted one another, who complemented each other's strengths and compensated for each other's limitations, who had common goals that were larger than an individual's goals, and who produced extraordinary results ... the team that became great didn't start off great-it learned how to produce extraordinary results.

The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.

A shared vision is not an idea...it is rather, a force in people's hearts...at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question 'What do we want to create?

A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.

An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision.

When there is genuine vision(as opposed to the all-too-familiar vision statement), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.

Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence .

Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.

Learning organizations organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.