ТОПИК
The engineer of the human corporation
The engineer of the human
corporation
Peter Senge has influence. The
Fifth Discipline, which encapsulated Prof Senge’s ideals about
organizational change, personal development and more besides, has sold close to
a million copies. The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), these days the
main focus of his energies, count BP, Shell, Hewlett-Packard and Intel among
its supporters. So, how did a business school academic – he remains a senior
lecturer at the Massachusetts
‘Remember that my training is
in engineering, not management’ he says.’I trained as an engineer because it
was the best way of learning about systems. This field- systems- seemed to me
to address the problem: the world was becoming more and more interdependent, we
were creating these patterns of interdependence, and yet we didn’t know how to
understand that. We were simply blind’.
Prof Senge’s ambition remain
to apply systems thinking to human systems: societies, organizations and companies. It was an urge that led him in
the 1980s to seek out Chris Argyris, of Harvard Business
School
It was from this mix of
ingredients that Prof Senge produce The
Fifth Discipline. The first four
disciplines are:
•‘personal mastery’ (broadly,
a commitment to your own and other people’s full development)
•‘mental models’ (reflecting
upon and questioning assumptions)
•‘shared vision’ (‘a force in
people’s hearts’)
•‘team learning’(or teamwork)
Systems thinking is the fifth discipline – a way of thinking about
problems that brings together the other ingredients and allow for real
organizational development.
The influent of The Fifth Discipline is undeniable. As
well as launching the ‘organizational learning’ movement, it gave new force to
the argument that the most effective organizations are also the most humane.
You do not need to be a true believer to acknowledge that the ideals are
intriguing. They challenge managers to think deeply not only about their own
role but also about corporate goals and purpose. The question is whether the
techniques laid out in The Fifth Discipline have really helped
organizations become more effective.
Prof Senge point to SoL’s ‘sustainability
consortium’, a group of companies working to take environmentally unfriendly
materials out of their supply chains, as systems thinking and ‘shared vision’
in action. Others are less convinced. Says Prof Schein:’It is by no means clear that making organizations more humane, making
them worth being part of, will work in the larger Darwinian scheme of things’.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий