Finally, some fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company. This is a valid fear. To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common mental models about the business reality within which they operate, empowering people will only increase organizational stress and the burden of management to maintain coherence and direction. This is why the discipline of personal mastery must always be seen as one among the set of disciplines of a learning organization. An organizational commitment to personal mastery would be naive and foolish if leaders in the organization lacked the capabilities of building shared vision and shared ment1:tJ.-models to guide local decision makers.
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THE DISCIPLINE PERSONAL MASTERY
The way to begin developing a sense of personal mastery is to approach it as a discipline, as a series of practices and principles that must be applied to be useful. Just as one becomes a master artist by continual practice, so the following principles and practices lay the groundwork for continually expanding the discipline of personal mastery.
Personal vision comes from within. Several years ago I was talking with a young woman about her vision for the planet. She said many lovely things about peace and harmony, about living in balance with nature. As beautiful as these ideas were, she spoke about them unemotionally, as if these were things that she should want. I asked her if there was anything else. After a pause, she said, "I want to live on a green planet," and started to cry. As far as I know, she had never said this before. The words just leaped from her, almost with a will of their own. Yet, the image they conveyed clearly had deep meaning to her-perhaps even levels of meaning that she didn't understand. Most adults have little sense of real vision. We have goals and objectives, but these are not visions. When asked what they want,