Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline drew millions of readers and popularized the TLO concept. The book presented five techniques or ‘disciplines’ that Senge said ‘must be studied and mastered to be put into practice’ within a TLO (1990: 10). Senge defined TLOs as:
organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.
The book sold over two and a half million copies, a result that encouraged Senge to say more about TLO. Over the following decade, he provided examples of the application of TLO principles in different contexts. In 1994, he and colleagues published The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. It has sold over 400,000 copies. A second fieldbook came out in 1999 under the title The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. In 2000, Senge co-authored Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares about Education. A revised version of the original Fifth Discipline appeared in 2006.
Senge created a compelling vision. Jackson (2000: 207) claimed the TLO concept had dramatic qualities and inspired ‘followers to see themselves actively engaged in building a learning organization.’ As popularity of the TLO concept quickly grew, Senge founded a Center for Organizational Learning at MIT in 1991. Emerald Group Publishing launched a journal named The Learning Organization in 1994. Several prominent business magazines, including Business Week and Fortune, published articles about TLO. In 1997, Harvard Business Review named The Fifth Discipline as one of the most influential management books in the last seventy-five years. Also in 1997, Senge formed the Society for Organizational Learning, which subsequently spawned a journal entitled Reflections: The SoL Journal and which has developed consulting, coaching, conference, and publishing initiatives for its members. In 1999, the Journal of Business Strategy included Senge among the twenty-four people who had exerted the greatest influence on business strategy during the twentieth century. In 2000 and 2001, the Financial Times and Business Week called him one of the world’s ‘top management gurus.’
Figure 11.1 shows the numbers of documents that cited The Fifth Discipline from 1990 through 2005. The graph terminates in 2005 because the more recent data are less and less complete, so trends tend to appear to indicate that citations are leveling off or declining near the time of data gathering. Very likely, citations have continued to increase since 2005. Three fields account for ninety-eight percent of the documents that cited The Fifth Discipline. Documents classified by Google as ‘social science,’ which accounted for forty-nine percent of the citations, have mainly discussed educational organizations. Documents classified as ‘business’ have generated an additional forty-one percent of the citations. Documents classified as ‘engineering,’ which supplied an additional eight percent of the citations, have mainly discussed information systems.
Figure 11.1 Citations of The Fifth Discipline
Citations from the journal named The Learning Organization have also continued to increase. Indeed, articles published by this journal have had surprisingly long citation lives. A typical article from the early issues received less than half of its total citations during the first nine years following publication, and the articles published in the journal’s first year were still receiving approximately one citation a piece per year, sixteen years later.