Sometimes called “The Father of Quality Management”, Walter Edwards Deming shaped the field during the twentieth century.
His work is strongly focussed on production processes, shop floors in automobile or other traditional industries, but I believe that a lot of it carries over to other fields, even software development. Fields like medicine have taken notice of Deming’s work, after all.
But even if you do not see an immediate application to your daily work, I think that knowing a little bit about Deming and his work contributes to your cultural enrichment. Deming had large influence on the world’s economy, albeit indirect in some instances.
A statistics professor at business school and a freelancing consultant, he advocated for statistical quality management in the industry, and in educating the managerial class in those statistical methods, as opposed to ad-hoc ones.
Deming wrote several books, the best known ones may be “The New Economics of Industry, Government, and Education” and “Out of the Crisis”. You can see from the titles that they are wide-ranged in topic, not textbooks on statistical methods.