Peter Senge

Peter Senge was named a "Strategist of the Century" by the Journal of Business Strategy, and one of 24 men and women who have had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today.

While Peter has studied how firms and organisations develop adaptive capabilities for many years at MIT, it was his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline that brought him into the limelight and popularised the concept of the learning organisation'. Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold and in 1997 Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years.

He is is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). His current areas of special interest focus on decentralising the role of leadership in organisations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.

Peter describes himself as an 'idealistic pragmatist'. This orientation has allowed him to explore and advocate some quite "utopian" and abstract ideas, especially around systems theory and the necessity of bringing human values to the workplace.

Aside from writing The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990), Peter Senge has also co-authored a number of other books linked to the themes first developed in The Fifth Discipline. These include The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994); The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999) and Schools That Learn (2000).