I'm not ashamed to say that, potentially, the most influential reading I have experienced to date is the seminal "Lean Thinking." Seemingly basic in concept, yet truly revolutionary if a company/org/person deeply internalizes and applies the major concepts: The customer defines the value; identify and optimize within the product value stream; maximize the flow of value within the value stream; enable the customer to pull their value; and, perfect the flow of value.
What we (my work team...the proverbial "we") have begun to discover and exploit are the deeper meanings that make up these 5 primary principles. A primary example is that a team provides better results than the individual. A value stream is the collection of activities required for the development of a product -- so the collection of that group of activities (often, people) provides for a greater result than a connection of separate functional groups. It's the team, the variety of perspectives and experience. This concept of team can be applied in a more liberal sense to great advances in identifying and optimizing processes, technology, work culture, and associate growth and learning.
The truly revolutionary concepts are those that can be generalized to be part of the whole system. Subjective application, to be sure, but what great aspiration than to bring your team to a level that learning is really about the deeper embedded concepts that support the multitude of B-books?
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