The Fifth Discipline

At the beginning of the 21st century, technology started to advance and subsequently became present in the everyday lives of the public. The internet was becoming a market with new, promising opportunities for both individuals and companies, including communication, outreach, and profit. The development and advancement of the internet has increased the rate of globalization and made people around the world closer to one another than was previously possible. Senge explains in the Introduction that globalization in business has improved the material standards of many people and made people more aware of the world around them, creating new dialogues and giving young people the chance to create “a web of relationships that has never existed before” (xv-vi). He also notes that since the book’s original publication, “the organizational learning practices that were limited to a few pioneers fifteen years ago have taken deeper root and spread” (xvi). He explores the companies and leaders who are implementing organizational learning to address the world’s problems in Part 4. However, globalization has also had the adverse effects of increasing “performance issues” in businesses and making people’s lives increasingly busy, to the point that it is becoming harder for people to regularly “think and reflect” (xv). Furthermore, business and management practices amid globalization are contributing to problems such as widening “[g]aps between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” and climate change (xv). Senge blames the popular, traditional system of management for worsening these problems, stating that it keeps companies in “perpetual fire-fighting mode, with little time or energy for innovation” (xvii). He hopes to advocate further for organizational learning to challenge the shortcomings of the traditional system of management and show managers and leaders disciplines to run organizations more systemically and encourage people’s inherent passion for knowledge and growth.

Though the problems of climate change and income equality plague the modern world amid globalization, many leaders around the world at the time had begun adopting organizational learning strategies. Senge cites successful leaders from the late 1990s and early 2000s who had been using these strategies. These include BP’s then Executive Vice President Vivienne Cox and Roger Salliant, who was a manager at Ford in the 1980s and 1990s. Both individuals exercised honest reflection with their management teams, allowing their respective companies to overcome problems and maintain success while creating better outcomes in the modern world. He also explores how, with globalization and advancing technology, women, working-class and poor people, racial minorities, and young people are taking dominant leadership and managerial roles. He uses Intel manager Ilean Galloway, a Black woman, various other women in management and business such as Cox, IFC’s Dorothy Hamachi-Berry, and Unilever’s Brigitte Tantawy-Monsou, Uganda Rural Development and Training project founder Mwalimu Musheshe, and young Pioneers of Change and Kufunda Village founder Marianne Knuth as examples. He also describes Unilever’s work toward sustainable fishing and the organizational learning work of the Sustainable Food Lab project. These leaders and groups are using learning to change business and management for the better and create a world that pursues knowledge and helps others, with knowledge of their connection to the world.