"A Currency paperback"--title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [391]-409) and index.

How our actions create our reality ... and how we can change it. "Give me a lever long enough ... and single-handed I can move the world" -- Does your organization have a learning disability? -- Prisoners of the system, or prisoners of our own thinking? -- The fifth discipline: the cornerstone of the learning organization. The laws of the fifth discipline -- A shift of mind -- Nature's templates: identifying the patterns that control events -- The principle of leverage -- The art of seeing the forest and the trees -- The core disciplines: building the learning organization. Personal mastery -- Mental models -- Shared vision -- Team learning -- Prototypes. Openness -- Localness -- A manager's time -- Ending the war between work and family -- Microworlds: the technology of the learning organization -- The leader's new work -- Coda. A sixth discipline? -- Rewriting the code -- The indivisible whole -- Appendix 1: The learning disciplines -- Appendix 2: Systems archetypes.

An MIT Professor's pathbreaking book on building "learning organizations"--Corporations that overcome inherent obstacles to learning and develop dynamic ways to pinpoint the threats that face them and to recognize new opportunities. Not only is the learning organization a new source of competitive advantage, it also offers a marvelously empowering approach to work, one which promises that, as Archimedes put it, "with a lever long enough ... single-handed I can move the world."