Learning Organizations
I pulled an “oldie but goodie” off the shelf the other day – Peter Senge’s 1990 “The Fifth Discipline”. It is interesting to think back to the challenges in developing a learning organization without the collaboration tools that we use in our daily work today – inter-organizational email, for example, simply did not exist! Anyway, I started along the path of an entry about the things we take for granted in our world – then I was interrupted.
I queried our friend Google about Senge and his discussion of mastery – and found a site that has shown up off and on in my search results for quite a while…. managementhelp.org is a great library of moderated, community-sourced information about management. The library was kicked off at about the same time as Wikipedia, and is among the top 20,000 sites in a good collection of English-speaking countries.
Take a look, learn and share the knowledge!
Lots of free information is not a sign of anything related to quality – neither because it’s free, nor because there’s lots of it. Neither is it a sign of poor quality – it’s a slightly less than random collection of somebody’s idea of a lot and it’s free. Oh yeah and it’s something about management – but then so are many sites. Discerning learners, please note: institutionalized libraries still exist for a reason. Go visit your nearest one – virtually or geo-spatially – and see if you can figure out who peter senge is an why he’s worth reading – first hand.
Thanks, Mary – a great reminder to us all that a library is qualitatively different from a web-site! The content in a library is the original – not someone’s “take” on the original, nor a summarized comment on a collection of summaries about the topic (as are far too many blogs!). In the absence of background to make that determination it is easy to place too much credence in unvalidated content on the web!
BTW – for any of you who feel too geo-spatially challenged to find a library, you can find the original work for sale on line from $15 to $30! You’ll find a better price at your local library…