Well, you can laugh about the germans, but they are praised about their "gründlichkeit" or punctuality in plain english, I have two german books I use the most for my work: One is the "Neufert" architects data, which contains every possible data for creating a rabbit-home till an bowlingalley and the other book "Kleine ergonomische datensammlung" or "small book with  ergonomic data". And I have a lot profit of these books

-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?