certain to win

is an excellent book by Chet Richards (isbn 1-4134-5376-7). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Man is the child of custom, not the child of his ancestors. [Ibn Khaldun, 1377 A.D.]

Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics.

Since what you're looking for is mistakes, a general rule is that bad news is the only kind that will do you any good.

A similar effect, a breakdown in the quality of energy, is well known to students of physics as "entropy". The energy is still there, but it isn't available for doing work. The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down.

The more you try to control people, the less control you get.

If a just-in-time production line had to wait for a formal decision process to work, it would hardly move at all, and it would never improve.

Complex methodologies can turn the attention of the company inwards.

We polish individual techniques and also train as a group.

It is not a matter of "getting it", it's a matter of doing it.

Mutual trust comes from mutual experience.

Most readers are familiar with the dualities that seem to inhabit everything oriental, the best known being the yin / yang. Yin signifies such things as endurance and the maintenance of the present states, while yang represents vitality and change. In the Taoist cosmology that underlies eastern strategy, neither can exist without the other, and the familiar symbol shows each depending on and containing the seed of the other.