We tend to think that, in a traditional organisation, people are producing results because management wants results, but the essence of a high-quality organisation is people producing results because they want the results. It's puzzling we find that hard to understand, that if people are really enjoying, they'll innovate, they'll take risks, they'll have trust with one another because they are really committed to what they're doing and it's fun

In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models - that is, they are responsible for learning.

Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.

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

One possibility for difficulties innovating is that most people really donÕt care about innovation.

By using the systems archetypes we can learn how to “structure” the details into a coherent picture of the forces at play.

I often say that leadership is deeply personal and inherently collective. That's a paradox that effective leaders have to embrace.