Quotes from Peter Senge

Learning cannot be disassociated from action.

Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique.

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.

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

You cannot have a learning organisation without a shared vision...A shared vision provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops.

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

We need to be the authors of our own life.

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.

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.

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.

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

The faster we go, the slower we need to be.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

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

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

System thinking is a discipline of seeing whole.