Great Throughts Treasury

"It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities."

"The bad leader is he who the people despise; the good leader is he who the people praise; the great leader is he who the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’ "

"The birth of the de-centered self can be profoundly disorienting, it is transcendental and often involves a heightened sense of awareness and connection. The analytical localized self can find it fragile, frightening and impossible to grasp... There is a sense of being present to what is seeking to emerge, with intentionality. If you follow your nature enough, if you follow your nature as it moves, if you follow so far that you really let go, then you find that you’re actually the original being, the original way of being. The original being knows things and acts, does things in its own [intuitive?] way. It actually has a great intention to be itself, and it will do so if you just let it."

"A shared vision is not an idea... it is rather, a force in people’s hearts... at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question. ‘What do we want to create?’ "

"People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them – in effect; they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. They do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization’s spiritual foundation."

"At its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of peoples’ powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders."

"Business and human endeavors are systems… we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved."

"All human beings are born with unique gifts. The healthy functioning of our community depends on its capacity to develop each gift. "

"Becoming a force of nature doesn’t mean that all of our aspirations must be grand. First steps are often small, and initial visions that focus energy effectively often address immediate problems. What matters is engagement in the service of a larger purpose rather than lofty aspirations that paralyze action. Indeed, it’s a dangerous trap to believe that we can pursue only great visions. [Seeds Are Small.]"

"Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo. "

"Commitment to the truth… means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events."

"Consider prejudice. Once a person begins to accept a stereotype of a particular group, that "thought" becomes an active agent, "participating" in shaping how he or she interacts with another person who falls in that stereotyped class. In turn, the tone of their interaction influences the other person’s behavior. The prejudiced person can’t see how his prejudice shapes what he "sees" and how he acts. In some sense, if he did, he would no longer be prejudiced. To operate, the "thought" of prejudice must remain hidden to its holder."

"Courage is simply doing whatever is needed in pursuit of the vision. "

"If people don’t have their own vision, all they can do is sign up for someone else’s. This result is compliance, never commitment. "

"In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails. "

"It is not the absence of defensiveness that characterizes learning teams but the way defensiveness is faced."

"New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works... images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models -- surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works -- promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations."

"It’s common to say that trees come from seeds. But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges."

"Learning is all about connections, and through our connections with unique people we are able to gain a true understanding of the world around us."

"Our prevailing leadership myths are still captured by the image of the captain of the cavalry leading the charge to rescue the settlers from the attacking Indians. "

"People with high levels of personal mastery... cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye. "

"Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning. "

"Our traditional views of leaders - as special people who set the direction, make the key decisions, and energize the troops - are deeply rooted in an individualistic and non-systemic worldview. "

"People don’t resist change; they resist being changed."

"Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations. "

"So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning. "

"Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. "

"Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes."

"That doesn’t mean it’s always happy. Sometimes it’s very intense, but you literally have the experience that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. That doesn’t mean it turns out according to your plan. It means that whatever turns out is exactly what is right in that moment, and that is the music."

"Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner."

"The Army’s After Action Review (AAR) is arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised. "

"The fantasy that somehow organizations can change without personal change, and especially without change on the part of people in leadership positions, underlies why many change efforts are doomed from the start."

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character."

"The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage."

"The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members’ awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform."

"The most effective people are those who can hold their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly. "

"The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition."

"The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension."

"The unhealthiness in our world today is in direct proportion to our inability to see it as a whole."

"Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. "

"Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it... This then, is the basic meaning of a learning organization -an organization that is continuously expanding its capacity to create its future. Survival learning or what is more often called adaptive learning is important - indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, adaptive learning must be joined by generative learning, learning that enhances our capacity to create."

"To create music, you have to have violins. You have to have instruments, okay? But the music doesn’t come from the violin. The violin is an instrument. For me, at an experiential level, giving a talk or working with a group in a workshop can be the same. I create that reality in my own consciousness, and then I play the instruments. I just really, really enjoy myself; I kind of fall into my love of the people. And I know, at some level, when I’m doing those programs and things begin to operate this way, nothing can go wrong. No matter what happens, it’s exactly what needs to happen right then. "

"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."

"Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end. "

"To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the music, but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself so you can slow our minds hearing to your ears natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning."

"We need to be the authors of our own life. It takes courage and skill to be unambiguous and clear. "

"We’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed for accessing the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond ones preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control and, as Salk said, making choices to serve the evolution of life. Ultimately, we came to see all these aspects of presence as leading to a state of letting come, of consciously participating in a larger field for change. When this happens, the field shifts, and the forces shaping a situation can shift from re-creating the past to manifesting or realizing an emerging future. "

"When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart."

"You cannot force commitment, what you can do… You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create. "

"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. So you have a society predicated on the idea that you have to keep growing materially, and yet nobody actually believes it. "