If people don't have their own vision, all they can do is 'sign-up' for someone else's.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

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.

How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?" The answer is. "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.They're immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150 years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar.

Personal mastery teaches us to choose. Choosing is a courageous act: picking the results and actions which you will make into your destiny.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence .

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