Design Thinking June 11, 2008, 2:55PM EST

Peter Senge's Necessary Revolution

In a new book, the management guru discusses the environmental woes facing business and some steps that may lead to a more sustainable world

Peter Senge, author of the new book, The Necessary Revolution Barry Hetherington

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Peter Senge, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, is perhaps best known for his 1990 best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline, which introduced the idea of the "learning organization." Now, Senge has a new work that promises to be as influential as the first. In The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday, 2008), Senge and his co-authors grapple with the daunting environmental problems we face, and highlight innovative steps taken by individuals and corporations, often in partnership with global organizations such as Oxfam, toward a more sustainable world.

It may seem surprising that an expert in management and organizational change is focusing on sustainability, but there is a strong connection to Senge's work. In his earlier book, he laid out an approach to management that combines systems thinking, collaboration, and team learning. As he describes it, a learning organization is one in which "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 to see the whole together." Such organizations tend to be more flexible, adaptive, and productive—critical qualities in a time of rapid change.

In The Necessary Revolution, Senge applies the same thinking to a system bigger and more complex than the organization: global society. The book is a call to arms, an argument to business leaders that they must rethink their approach to the environment or, as one executive told Senge, "we won't have businesses worth being in in 20 years." But the authors don't linger on the problems, focusing instead on the stories and insights of successful innovators, on creative solutions, and on practical approaches to meeting these challenges. Jessie Scanlon recently met Peter Senge at his Cambridge (Mass.) office to talk about the critical role that business will play in the coming revolution, the visionary leaders at companies such as Nike (NKE) and Costco (COST), and the future of the corporation. An edited version of their conversation follows.

Why did you title the book The Necessary Revolution?

I don't really like the word "necessary" because it makes it seem we have no choice. On the one hand, we don't. There's only so much water in the world. There's only so much topsoil. There's only one atmosphere, so there's only so much CO2 that can be stuffed into the atmosphere. But real change occurs when people make choices. We're not going to get out of the predicament that we're in by a lot of teeny incremental things. It's going to take bold ideas.

The word "revolution" was meant to be in the spirit of the Industrial Revolution. Not a political revolution because this absolutely has to be a nonpartisan issue. The future doesn't belong to one party or another.

In the book, you argue that we must shed "industrial age beliefs." Can you elaborate?

One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble.