Peter Senge, founder of the Centre for Organisational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a "learning organisation" that used "systems thinking" as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy. He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released in 1990, written for those interested in integrating his philosophy into their corporate culture.

The Fifth Discipline has turned many readers into true believers; it remains the ideal introduction to Senge's carefully integrated corporate framework, which is structured around "personal mastery", "mental models", "shared vision", and "team learning". Using ideas that originate in fields from science to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organisation matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practising it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system. The book's concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever.

This text presents an approach to management that has attained position on the International Hall of Fame, and explains and critiques the ideas in straight forward terms. The book aims to make fundamental improvements to the core discipline of systemic thinking. It establishes crucial developments in this area in the context of the learning organization, including creativity and organizational transformation. It is therefore a text for strategic planners, organizational change agents and consultants. Key features of this work include a review and critique of "The Fifth Discipline" and systemic thinking, and an introduction to the gurus of systemic thinking - Senge, Bertalanffy, Beer, Ackoff, Checkland and Churchman. The text also looks at ideas for a redefinition of management through systemic thinking, a guide to choosing, implementing and evaluating improvement strategies, and information on practical animation. The author has implemented systemic management in a wide range of organizations in many continents and lectured by invitation in 25 countries, including Japan and the USA.

This classic text offers an illuminating discussion of key concepts of concern to all managers: culture, motivation, leadership, power, role-playing and working in groups. Ever mindful of actual business practice, Handy directly addresses how managers can translate the six main concepts into invaluable tools for effective management. He discusses how all organizations need to select, develop and reward their people; to structure and design their work; to resolve political conflicts; to lay down guidelines for their managers; and to plan for the future. In each case, the approaches and techniques described here are invaluable.

Equally important, Handy excels at presenting his ideas in colourful, immediately accessible ways, filling the book with illuminating examples and inventive metaphors that range from Tolstoy's ideas on the concept of self, to the many meanings of "good morning," to the conversations that occur in a stopped elevator, to the proper size for a vineyard or an elephant. He shows, for instance, how an optical illusion experiment sheds light on interdepartmental relations, and how the way schoolchildren are typecast by their peers helps explain corporate hierarchies. And along with case studies, graphs, charts, and questionnaires, Understanding Organizations is peppered with boxed sections that offer advice and stimulate thought, brimming with provocative quotations from business wizards such as Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Warren Bennis, Alvin Toffler, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, as well as from Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gail Sheehy, and Joseph Heller.

Knowledge is power. In corporate terms knowledge means efficiency, productivity and ultimately profit, but too often it is not exploited to the full. Learning to Fly shows how organisations can take the knowledge within a company and turn it to a new advantage. It has been built from the real-world experiences of authors Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell during their time working for BP.

The book is divided into three parts. First the concept of knowledge management is introduced--if you've not come across it before, this section explains the principles. Part two describes how various techniques can be applied in order to share knowledge. The theory is fleshed out with real-world examples. Finally, part three takes a look at how knowledge management can be embedded within an organisation's everyday work rather than be simply applied as if an afterthought. The goal is to achieve a situation in which sharing knowledge is an everyday practice that does not need specialists to manage it. To this end, "Action Zones" encourage the reader to think about their own situation and ideas, and practical suggestions are offered. Learning to Fly puts the theory in place in order to explain how to use it in real-life working environments.