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This is a wonderful little book about the Japanese art style called Wabi-sabi. The book is short, and many of the pages consist solely of full-page photographs illustrating the ideas. So it's a quick read, but worth taking the time to read slowly, let it sink in, and then read again.

Wabi-sabi itself originated as an eclectic style of the Japanese tea ceremony, emphasising the impermanence and ever-changing quality of all things. But the book keeps its feet on the ground and doesn't spend too much time deep in Zen territory.

I read this book on Kent Beck's recommendation during the early years of eXtreme Programming -- see c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi for more on that. As an XP/agile coach I recommend it to any team that gets hung up on the search for perfection, to remind them that every state is transitional, and the idea of anything being "finished" is an illusion.

Yet another Theory of Constraints novel, this one focussing on Critical Chain project management. As TOC novels go, this is certainly one of the most readable, although the characters are as two-dimensional as ever.

What lets this book down, however, is the complete lack of detail on Critical Chain itself. Sure, there are a few verbal walk-throughs of CRTs, and some discussion of Student Syndrome and suchlike. But really, the book is more of a sales pitch than a how-to manual. As such, I learned almost nothing; and that's a shame, because otherwise I enjoyed the story.