A business maverick's story and a novel approach to Lean and Six Sigma:

BEHIND THE CLOUD: The untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company - and revolutionized an industry

Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler

In 1996, after a decade working his way into the senior management ranks of Oracle, Marc Benioff was unsure of what to do next. He took three months off, renting a hut on Hawaii's Big Island. Then he spent two months in India, meditating and meeting with spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama and Ammachi, "the mother of immortal bliss", who opened his eyes to the possibility of "doing business and doing good" - one of the founding principles of Salesforce.com, the CRM and cloud software company he went on to found.

"Don't be afraid to take time off; my sabbatical was one of the most productive periods of my career," he counsels. It is also lesson one (of 111) in the "playbooks" that make up Behind the Cloud.

Salesforce has gone on to become the market leader in cloud software, with its software-as-a-service applications used by 2 million people and its AppExchange platform the storefront for 850 applications.

But despite the title, this is not a book about the rise of cloud. Rather, it is Benioff sharing the lessons he learnt in building a $1.3 billion company from the ground up. Some of those are the rule-breaking moves of a maverick - not surprising given his goal of overthrowing the established order of the software industry with a different technology model, a different sales model and a different philanthropic model. [link here to interview]

Which explains the choice of 111 plays. From its start, Salesforce.com has donated 1% of its equity, employees' time and software services to those most in need.

VELOCITY: Combining Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints to achieve breakthrough performance

Dee Jacob, Suzan Bergland and Jeff Cox

Velocity is part of the current fad for "business novels", where strategic concepts are presented through the medium of fiction. While it's never going to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature - the plot and characterisation are more John Grisham than John Updike - it still presents a highly readable alternative to the majority of soporific business tomes.

What it lacks in creative skill, it more than compensates for from an instructive point of view, providing an excellent - and accessible - introduction to Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints.

The story is based around the exploits of a newly appointed CEO, Amy Cieolara, and her attempt to turn around a troubled manufacturing business. In the process she has to stand up to a fearsome parent company, deal with a dysfunctional IT system and live through a series of production nightmares. Through this "real-life" context, it demonstrates a clear route to combining the three disciplines in order to create genuine bottom-line benefits - while pointing out many of the pitfalls.

It may not teach experts in any of these fields a huge amount, but if you're planning an implementation of any kind of continuous improvement programme, it's a great book to leave on your team members' desks with the hint they take it away for a little holiday reading.

So many companies have made major investments in improvement concepts, but not seen the expected return, say the authors. The answer is in the plot.