Peter Senge quotes

Peter Senge is an American systems scientist, organizational theorist, and author, most famous for his book "The Fifth Discipline." His work focuses on the concept of learning organizations and systems thinking in management. He continues to inspire leaders globally to foster continuous learning and innovation in their organizations. Here are 88 of his quotes:

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Peter Senge

When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle and long-term than those of power-wielding hierarchical leaders.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

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

Peter Senge

People don't resist change. They resist being changed.

Peter Senge

People with high levels of personal mastery...cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.

Peter Senge

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the 'structures' that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change. That is, by seeing wholes we learn how to foster health. To do so, systems thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think.

Peter Senge

A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All of these events are distant in time and space, if they're all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, and influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of rainstorm by contemplating the whole not any part of the pattern. Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

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

Peter Senge

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

Peter Senge

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

Peter Senge

In essence, leaders are people who "walk ahead," people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations.

Peter Senge

We believe that, ultimately, the most important learning occurs in the context of our day-to-day life, the aspirations we pursue, the challenges we face, and the responses we bring forth.

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge

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

Peter Senge

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?

Peter Senge

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.

Peter Senge