The Fifth Discipline

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

Senge’s quote of W. Edwards Deming criticizes the popular management system’s focus on rewards and profit, as well as its categorization of people into separate parts. This quote expands Senge’s understanding of the need to feed managers’ desire to learn and innate human desire to create. The establishment of this reward system at a young age reflects how the popular system in the Western world sets people up to fail and limits their ability to reach their potential early in life. It also shows how ingrained this system is in the Western world. Senge stresses The World as a Connected System in his and Deming’s condemnation of the prevailing system’s division of people within the system. This division and focus on rewards worsens the world’s situations by encouraging greed and self-interest when management must focus on helping people.

“Engineers say that a new idea has been ‘invented’ when it is proven to work in the laboratory. The idea becomes an ‘innovation’ only when it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at practical costs. If the idea is sufficiently important, such as the telephone, the digital computer, or commercial aircraft, it is called a ‘basic innovation,’ and it creates a new industry or transforms an existing industry. In these terms, learning organizations have been invented, but they have not yet been innovated.”

Senge argues that while the formation of an idea is important, ideas must be put to the test and put into action to become an innovation. The gradual process of innovation supports Learning as an Ongoing Process and highlights the patience managers and companies must have as they create new ideas and devices. Senge’s comparison of the use of devices and, in another part of the book, the airplane prototypes before the commercial plane, are meant to give