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Hardcover
209 pages
ISBN 9780805091748 Published Dec. 2009
Metropolitan Books
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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.
Friday Links
Posted Jan. 29, 2010 11:49 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
I will not be mentioning the iPad in the links below. Moving on...
➻ Umair Haque's The Generation M Manifesto on the Harvard Business Review website is rather old, but I hadn't seen it, so maybe you haven't either. Tip of the Hat to Tiny Gigantic for pointing me to it.
➻ If you've read Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, you probably remember The Marshmallow Test. The experiment tests a person's impulse control as a child and how it can predict future success, such as a significantly higher SAT scores. Sally tracked down an NPR video of the test, and then also a New Yorker article explaining the science.
➻ The Paper Cuts Book Review Podcast interviewed Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto.
➻ The Daily Beast picked I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay and The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives as two of this week's "hot reads." Find the reviews here: I.O.U. | The Hidden Brain
➻ The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has come up with a great idea to help relief efforts in Haiti: Font Aid IV, a project uniting the typographic and design communities to design a collaborative font. To learn more or get involved, check Typophile.
➻ Hyper Modern Writing discussed virtual book signings with Jenny Greenleaf.
➻ Todd Sattersten reminds us That Ideas Need Air.
➻ GalleyCat did a good job of rounding up material Remembering Howard Zinn, Louis Auchincloss, and J.D. Salinger.
➻ The video below is great, and this one from Daytrotter is mindfeckingly fantastic.
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.
