The Fifth Discipline

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, a professor at MIT. Some might call it a business book. It focuses primarily on teaching readers to use "systems thinking" to turn companies into learning organizations that respond and adapt to change. That's useful advice to those in management positions, but I have to be honest and confess that the chapter on personal mastery changed my life in a big way. It put into words something that I had been thinking and feeling for a long time: namely, that we have the power to change the systems that influence us.

The Fifth Discipline (Senge) As a systems architect struggling with Conway's Law, this has helped me understand systems-of-people better and given me some simple ways to think about interactions in a more abstract fashion.