What can sport teach us about life and how best to live it? Each week Simon Mundie sits down with an expert and uses sport to answer life’s big questions in this BBC podcast.

You can access all episodes from this series on the BBC website, or click on the image.

This is the story of how Sir Clive Woodward took the England rugby team from low ranking internationals to World Cup Champions. It’s not typically classed as a ‘lean book’ but the way they tackle a period of great change and their team building ethic is impressive. It mirrors the practise, effort and desire required to make lean succeed in any business. Lots to learn from this book.

Described by Fortune as a ‘guru to industry’ and by Businessweek as a ‘genius’, Eliyahu M. Goldratt was an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems. This 20th anniversary edition includes a series of detailed case study interviews by David Whitford, Editor at Large, Fortune Small Business, which explore how organizations around the world have been transformed by Eli Goldratt’s ideas.

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker’s management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.

With its winning mix of gripping narrative and easy-to-implement performance-raising tips, this book has become a best-selling classic. It’s garnered 5-star reviews and wide-ranging endorsements – from Sebastian Coe and Dame Kelly Holmes to Lord Digby Jones. The book tells the inspiring story of how Ben Hunt-Davis – an ordinary guy in an ordinary team – achieved something pretty extraordinary: Olympic Gold. Co-author Harriet Beveridge, Executive Coach, then gives a simple, engaging account of how we can apply these strategies to raise our own game… in sport, in business and in life.

A must-read for all managers, leaders, and change agents, Performance Hubs: Engaging Teams in Focused Continuous Improvement supplies a proven system for engagement that allows teams to use their own data, understand the need for performance improvement, and drive improvements at their own level. Highlighting common pitfalls in improvement initiatives, it provides the tools to help you avoid the disinterested cultural response to improvement efforts that is all too common in organisations suffering from initiative overload.

The book details a comprehensive solution to help all employees visualise operational performance. It explains how to cascade the right metrics across all levels of your business to trigger the appropriate use of Lean/Six Sigma tools and techniques into strategic process areas.