The Checklist Manifesto

I gave a couple of copies of this book to people and taught a short course based on it, to IT architects and Project Managers.
If you have an important, complex process you do frequently, you MUST read this book.
The ideas, as Gawande says, are simple. So simple that people often don't believe they are so effective. But they are. He provides lots of evidence from many disciplines and I have proven them in complex systems development.

Dr. Gawande's reputation proceeded him, meaning that much of the medical community had already read the NEJM article on the same topic, considered how it applied to subfields of medicine, personal practices, etc. and the reforms espoused had largely been adopted, at least by the American medical community by the time of publication.

Nonetheless, Dr. Gawande's journey to discover why checklists matter, the subtle ways in which they matter and the fields that have instituted them was an interesting, if slightly shallow read.