When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

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

When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible - and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important.

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.

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.

We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.

In great teams conflict becomes productive.