The Dance of Transformation—Challenges Faced by Learning Organizations in Sustainable Development

Author: (American) Peter Senge et al., Wang Qiuhai et al
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-11-01
Features: Any process of continuous deep transformation requires a fundamental change in our way of thinking. We need to recognize the nature of the growth process (the force that drives our efforts) and how to stimulate them. We also need to understand the forces that hinder progress and the challenges, so that we can develop feasible strategies to address these challenges. We must understand the "Dance of Change," which is the inevitable interaction between the growth process and the limiting process. This is the law of nature. We either go with the flow or go against it. The "Dance of Change" gathers the challenges, confusion, successes, and failures faced by many American and world-renowned management masters and outstanding entrepreneurs in the past decade or so in implementing corporate and organizational change, restructuring, and creating learning organizations. Their thoughts and explorations have been summarized into the deep challenges and the growth process of transformation. This book is a continuation of "The Fifth Discipline" and is a collective work by Peter Senge and other scholars. It will provide new ideas and valuable insights for organizational reform in our country, especially for corporate reform. You don't need to read this book page by page; open to any page, and you will be deeply engaged. This is a highly original and innovative work, where any concept in any chapter will prompt you to re-examine your past understanding.
"The Fifth Discipline" was designed to guide the creation of learning organizations, and its historical achievements have been proven by the success of many great companies and organizations worldwide. Many Fortune 500 companies have used it as a guide to create learning organizations. In contrast, "The Dance of Change" gathers the challenges, confusion, successes, and failures faced by many American and world-renowned management masters and outstanding entrepreneurs in the past decade or so in implementing corporate and organizational change, restructuring, and creating learning organizations. Their thoughts and explorations have been summarized into the deep challenges and the growth process of transformation. This book is not a quick-fix pamphlet on "behavioral change," but rather the result of skillfully applying systems thinking to observe and analyze. By helping us improve our fundamental ways of thinking and driving, and by enhancing our organization's self-learning ability, we can improve the interactions within our organization, between organizations, and between organizations and the external world. This enables us to respond to a changing world with ease, pushing each other forward, and creating our future.
This book provides us with a key to tackle challenges, offering new ideas and experiential resources to support comprehensive transformation of enterprises in new environments. It powerfully interprets the new concept of deep transformation—learning organizations and their interactive, shared learning systems—as the only sustainable competitive advantage for enterprises to adapt to change and create the future. This is a widely recognized consensus among both academia and successful enterprises today, as well as one of the most clear-sighted and wise answers yet given by the law of social competition. Unlike traditional learning, the learning of learning organizations is a team-based learning within the enterprise, a continuous and strategically applicable process. It not only leads to changes in corporate knowledge, beliefs, and actions but, more importantly, enhances the enterprise's innovation capacity and growth momentum.