I received this inquiry:
> Happy New Year to You all
> I have a question:
> Do Senge have a defenition of what an organisation is ?
I answered:
I'm not sure if Senge has a definition of "Organization."
If you consider...
- A team
- An organization
- A community
All are collections of people that have something to do with each other
and some collective results.
The team is the most clearly focused on their desired outcomes. One good
definition of a team is a group of people who need each other to produce a
desired result. A team is usually small enough that their desired result
is more specific (narrow). For example, the sales team.
A community (as in a community of interest or a community of practice) has
common interests and may produce similar or related results, but the
result is less significant that the practices and quality of the
experience. For example, the world wide community of people interested in
org learning.
An organization (or institution) is somewhere in between in terms of the
results. It is usually bigger than a team, has more desired results
(sales, profits, return to stakeholders, quality of experience for the
employees, retention, market share, quality, support for the neighboring
community, etc.)
Hope this is helpful.
-=- Rick
--Richard Karash ("Rick") | <http://world.std.com/~rkarash> Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer | email: Richard@Karash.com "Towards learning organizations" | Host for Learning-Org Discussion (617)227-0106, fax (617)523-3839 | <http://www.learning-org.com>
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