ABSTRACT
Arie de Geus is a former executive with Royal Dutch/Shell who, together with Peter M.Senge, is responsible for the development of the concept of the ‘learning organisation’. In the early 1990s it was Senge, through his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline (1990), who did most to disseminate and popularise the concept. More recently, however, de Geus has produced an important body of writing in his own right, notably The Living Company (1997), in which he takes an organic and holistic view of organisations and closely links their ability to learn with the extent to which they are integrated into their environment. Though his work has been greeted with none of the fanfare that surrounded The Fifth Discipline, de Geus offers an important organisational model for the future, one which stresses the links between organisation and knowledge, between strategy and environment.
