Every day, we are bombarded with messages about how to get things done. We hear a lot less, though, about how to get things right. Most waste in business operations come not from doing the right work inefficiently, but simply doing the wrong work in the first place.

Here are three books that should be on the reading list of anyone charged with managing and improving business operations. Only one of them is a traditional business book.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books, 2009). Although Gawande is a surgeon—his operations are operations in the truest sense of the word—and the context of his book is essentially medical, this is a very important book about the power of a simple standard to improve any operation.

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