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142 PART 3: THE PERSONAL SIDE OF LEADERSHIP

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that created organizational success. Maintaining product development time in
the face of increasing management complexity depends upon senior engineers’
management ability. Thus, understanding the circle of causality enables leaders
to allocate resources to the training and development of engineering leadership
as well as directly to new products. Without an understanding of the system, top
leaders would fail to understand why increasing R&D budgets can actually in-
crease product development time and reduce the number of new products coming
to market.
The other element of systems thinking is learning to infl uence the system with
reinforcing feedback as an engine for growth or decline. In the example of new
products, after managers see how the system works, they can allocate revenues
to speed new products to market, either by hiring more engineers, or by training
senior engineers in management and leadership skills. They can guide the system
when they understand it conceptually. Without this kind of understanding, man-
agers will hit blockages in the form of seeming limits to growth and resistance
to change because the large complex system will appear impossible to manage.
Systems thinking is a signifi cant solution.

Personal Mastery
Another concept introduced by Senge is personal mastery, a term he uses to de-
scribe the discipline of personal growth and learning, of mastering yourself in a
36
way that facilitates your leadership and achieves desired results.
Personal mastery
Personal mastery Personal mastery embodies three qualities—personal vision, facing reality, and
the discipline of personal growth
the discipline of personal growth holding creative tension. First, leaders engaged in personal mastery know and clarify
and learning and of mastering
and learning and of mastering
yourself; it embodies personal what is important to them. They focus on the end result, the vision or dream
yourself; it embodies personal
visions, facing reality, and
visions, facing reality, and that motivates them and their organization. They have a clear vision of a desired
holding creative tension future, and their purpose is to achieve that future. One element of personal mas-
holding creative tension
tery, then, is the discipline of continually focusing and defi ning what one wants as
their desired future and vision.