Peter Senge Quotations

You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.

In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier.

A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.

We often spend so much time coping with problems along our path that we forget why we are on that path in the first place. The result is that we only have a dim, or even inaccurate, view of what's really important to us.

We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.