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.

Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.

Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved.

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

In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality.

In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive.

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.