Read this Sunday afternoon in the coffee shop: The chapter in Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software espousing Christopher Alexander's Quality Without a Name concept and how it applies to software. Very intriguing. I'm late coming to all of this, of course, but me thinks I shall be giving it more serious thought (as QWAN applies to software, organizations, and other things I'm interested in building—though, those two are primary) whilst drinking tea in the near future.
And also: Interestingly, while clicking around Amazon just now, in the list of "Customers who shopped for The Timeless Way of Building [a Christopher Alexander book] also shopped for:" was Jim Collin's Good to Great, which I'm also reading right now (and obsessing over) and, while superficially unrelated to Alexander, or Gabriel, or patterns, seemed to have primed the pump in my brain for digesting the Quality Without a Name stuff today.