The 365 Best Business Books Of All-Time: The Fifth Discipline

We are starting the year with The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge — the seminal book that introduced the corporate world to the “learning organization”.

While I could have chosen any number of principles from the book to focus on (just one part of the book lists the 11 Laws of The Fifth Discipline), the one that had the most profound impact on me was one relating to something we all miss.

My Key Takeaway/Principle

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

This is one of the most important principles to understand if you want to become an entrepreneurial learner.

The most learning happens through feedback. It can be feedback from an instructor, feedback from your peers, or feedback from the marketplace. Often, the best feedback comes in the form of failure because it’s highly emotional, and so we pay attention to it.

However, sometimes the feedback is hidden over time, and so we don’t see it. Here’s an example that I think makes this point.

Let’s assume that starting today you made the decision to cut out one coffee a day. Let’s also assume that you usually have your coffee with one cream and one sugar. That means that each day moving forward you’d consume 100 calories less than you did up until now.

Over the short run, nothing much would change. Because you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat it takes you 35 days to lose just one pound. And because the average person changes a pant size for every 8 lbs gained/lost, it would take you more than 9 months to move down a pant size.

(Calm down diet nerds, I know this example is over simplified and doesn’t perfectly represent reality, which is another learning lesson for another week — no mental model perfectly matches reality)

By then, you’ll have completely forgotten that you cut out that extra coffee, and come up with some alternative explanation for why your pants are fitting a little better these days.

Of course, this can and will happen in more consequential business areas as well, like eroding market share caused by a decision you made 9 months ago.

The more you understand these cause and effect relationships, and get your people pay attention to them, the faster and more effectively your organization will learn.

Questions to ask yourself

• What can I do today to start paying closer attention to long-term cause and effect relationships?
• How can I get my team to do the same thing?

What else is covered in this book?

For starters, you can learn more about the other 10 laws of The Fifth Discipline, including “the easy way out usually leads back in” and “dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants”.

This year (2018) I’m reading and summarizing the top 365 business books of all-time. You can get the full list of books, and links to my reviews of each book, by clicking here.

Happy learning!