Peter Senge quotes

Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them. (Peter Senge)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Senge
The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms. View quote
Peter Senge
People don't resist change. They resist being changed. View quote
Peter Senge
Theres a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Senge
In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money. View quote
Peter Senge
Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic. View quote
Peter Senge
The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence. View quote
Peter Senge
In essence, leaders are people who "walk ahead," people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Senge
Systems thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management. (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. View quote
Peter Senge
Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Peter Senge