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Posted Feb. 3, 2010 6:55 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
There's a new article today on Salon titled: Healthcare Reform Rock Star, featuring one of our favorite authors, Atul Gawande. Gawande is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, books we copiously recommended. And his first book, Complications, garnered rave reviews.
Each of Gawande's books, though stocked full with stories about the field of medicine, reach far beyond the anecdotal. Really, the ways that Gawande suggests we improve healthcare are applicable across industries. His books are really about work, about doing good work and doing work well. This article in Salon includes Gawande's advice for healthcare reform (the political kind) but he also discusses why he focused on checklists in this latest work and it is a good example of just how pragmatic his advice is:
So why in the world would you write a book about checklists, of all things?
What we're grappling with in reform or public health is immense complexity. We do 50 million operations a year in the U.S., with 150,000 deaths within 30 days. Five hundred thousand people are disabled, and half of those are avoidable. When we think about how we grapple with complexity, we've been using two solutions: super-specialization and technology. These haven't been good enough. When I looked at how other worlds like aviation and construction grapple with complexity, I found checklists.
But checklists are also an admission of fallibility. It's an admission that individuals aren't the only thing that matter, that chains of people and processes matter. Further, it's an admission that we can't handle the complexity that's coming at us. And I think that's the case across lots of walks of life.
And it is the case. While it may seem like rote advice: life is complex; use checklist, Gawande is getting to something more important here which is evident in his statement that "checklists are also an admission of fallibility." Whether it is due to feelings of responsibility or hubris, we often think we can handle more than we can, to the detriment of the people around us. Gawande does something similar in his book, Better, addressing "how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable." We may all set out to excel at our chosen professions, endeavor to do our best every day, but when lives (or our businesses or our families) are on the line, how do we actually match the work to those intentions?
At the end of the Salon article, Gawande is asked what he would like to be remembered as having accomplished. As a relatively young surgeon, and with a lot more to say no doubt about medicine and work, Gawande said, "I don't know. My teams once asked me what our mission statement is. All I could come up with is to do cool stuff that lasts. That's all I got."
That too is a motto that transcends any field.
***
Read our Jack Covert Selects on The Checklist Manifesto here.
Read our review of Better, which was included in the "lost" The 100 Best Business Books of All Time chapter on Industry books which can be downloaded here.
Jack Covert Selects - The Checklist Manifesto
Posted Dec. 11, 2009 7:56 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, 224 Pages, $24.50, Hardcover, January 2010, ISBN 9780805091748
Atul Gawande is the Malcolm Gladwell of medical and ethical writing, with one big difference: Gawande is not just a cultural observer who tells great stories; instead he is a practicing surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School and, as a true insider who happens to be a very talented writer for The New Yorker, his work is precise and detailed while also elegant and arresting. The Checklist Manifesto is the author’s third book and he continues along the same theme of his previous works by revealing flaws in medical care and pondering larger ethical dilemmas that can contribute to the loss of life.
In my favorite of Gawande’s previous books, Better, the author tackles the complicated issues and thought that derives from a very simple concept—getting better, for both the patient and the medical practitioner. In The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande’s focus is the lowly checklist. With the incredible amount of complex data and information medical professionals are currently inundated with, they need help breaking down and remembering the small things.
Gawande opens Chapter 1 with a story about a young girl who fell through the ice and was underwater for 30 minutes. A small, local Austrian hospital saved her life because they were experienced in dealing with avalanche victims and had created a checklist they followed during just such situations. Later, in another story that moves beyond the medical profession, Gawande harkens back to 1935 when Boeing demoed their latest aircraft for the government. It crashed, and the investigation showed that the Boeing plane was “too much airplane for one man to fly.” The pilot who died had forgotten a simple procedure before takeoff. Boeing, who almost went bankrupt because of the crash, was saved by a group of test pilots who got together and created a checklist that pilots would follow. That Boeing aircraft would be retested, passed, and become the Boeing B-17 which would go on to fly 1.8 million miles without another accident. The author concludes that:
[C]hecklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.
Ultimately, checklists are about consistency, about preparing in times of calm a strategy to handle emergencies.
As with his previous books, in The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande asks of professionals one key thing: to be humble enough to admit one’s own humanity and take simple steps to prevent simple errors that are all too often very costly. And perhaps what is most admirable about Gawande is that he does not leave himself out of this request, admitting to his own mistakes and allowing us a glimpse at his own fallibility and that very humility that is needed to improve ourselves.
Our Response to BusinessWeek
Posted Feb. 8, 2009 3:32 p.m. by todd-sattersten
In 100 Best - 800 CEO Read Blog
There are only a few people in the media who know business books as well as Jack and I. Hardy Green, an associate editor at BusinessWeek, is one of those people.
We met with Hardy in New York two weeks ago and he quickly commenced with critiquing our selections for The 100 Best. He has also written a great piece for BusinessWeek.com titled, "What Makes a 'Best' Business Book?" that captures his thoughts on the omissions and gaffes in the book.
The way we see it Green's argument is two-fold.
His first criticism is that we have overlooked too many histories and narratives; the most glaring omissions being Barbarians at the Gate by Burrough and Heylar and Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. He points out the imbalance between the 21 books in the categories of biographies, narratives, and "big ideas" to the 29 management titles when he combines our strategy, leadership, and management chapters.
His second point is one of recency. He asks, "What about something like The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (Gotham Books, 2007)? What about entries on Silicon Valley or the digital world, such as Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross (Free Press, 2008)?," His preference for more current titles seems to speak to his perspective as an editor at weekly business magazine.
We love the work Green does for the business book category, but we obviously disagree.
First, he seems to overlook books we've included within other chapters when he tallies the count of narratives versus management manuals. Contained within our entrepreneurship chapter is the wonderful incubation story of The Republic of Tea . Or sitting squarely in the leadership chapter is the GE history Control Your Destiny Or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman. Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner appears in our strategy chapter. The Tipping Point, Why We Buy, and Orbiting the Giant Hairball also all fulfill Green's hope for books promoting a more thoughtful synthesis of business.
In fact, we could provide Green with even more titles that could have been included if we were to have used his criteria. How about Father, Son, and Company by Thomas Watson Jr.? Or Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect? Or Typo, the wonderful and woeful tale of David Silverman's adventure trying to revive a typesetting company in rural Iowa. All would have been wonderful additions--and they are in the book. We recommended these and 292 other books as further reading at the end of the reviews and in sidebars sprinkled throughout the book.
In regards to his request for more current titles, Green surely knows publishing well enough to know that this book was finished almost a year ago, months before the current economic mess. If we were to update the book today, we would love to recommend the Michael Lewis edited compilation Panic to our readers. And we may have looked past some accessibility problems to suggest Nassim Nicholas Taleb and either his Fooled by Randomness or The Black Swan.
Many of the narratives Green would like to see more of have a short shelf-life given the speed as which the world moves. Do we still have the same interest in Ebay or Starbucks that we had a few years ago? We solved this problem by producing an online chapter of industry narratives for which the sidebar on page 262 is a jumping-off point. Barbarians at the Gate appears in this additional section along with Where The Suckers Moon, The Box, Oil on The Brain, and Better. We feel the selections show both ingenuity and recency and exist in an online form that is more easily updated.
All this leads to a bigger point: You can't solve all of the problems of business with 100 books. The scope and variety of challenges, both personal and organizational, require a larger inventory of titles. Of course, we needed to make tough decisions about what was included in The 100 Best and we'll be judged--by Hardy Green and others--on our taste and discernment, but the structure and format of the book clearly shows our hope that by reading our book you will be encouraged to read more business books.
Maybe, after reading the review of a book you are familiar with, you will read the additional books we recommend. Or maybe you'll choose your own adventure by following a 'Where To Next?', jump to a book you never expected...and read it. Or maybe you'll become so enraged that we have overlooked one of your favorites that you go back and read it again to ensure its position in your personal 100 Best. In any of these instances, our book will have accomplished its task.
If you are interested in continuing the disucssion, jump over to BusinessWeek and leave your thoughts with the others already there.
