Peter Senge Quotes - Page 3

The discipline of personal mastery...starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us (and) living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.

If you want real, significant, sustainable change, you need talented, committed local line leaders. If the line manager is not innovating, then innovation is not going to occur.

The care leadership strategy is simple: be a model. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. Talking about personal mastery may open people's minds somewhat, but actions always speak louder than words. There is nothing more powerful you can do to encourage others in their quest for personal mastery than to be serious in your own quest.

In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality.

We need to be the authors of our own life.

Business and human endeavors are systems...we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.

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.

Mastery of creative tension brings out the capacity for perseverance and patience. Time is an ally.

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

All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning community depends on realizing the capacity to develop each gift.

Learning cannot be disassociated from action.

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

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.

The easy way out usually leads back in.

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.

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.

Perhaps for the first time in history, human-kind has the capacity to create far more information than anyone can absorb; to foster far greater interdependency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyone's ability to keep pace.

Commitment to the truth...means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events.

Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.

A unique relationship develops among team members who enter into dialogue regularly. They develop a deep trust that cannot help but carry over to discussions. They develop a richer understanding of the uniqueness of each person's point of view.

If people don't have their own vision, all they can do is 'sign-up' for someone else's.

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

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