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Posted Dec. 11, 2009 7:56 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
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.
Posted Dec. 11, 2009 4:16 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
When companies buckle down and tighten their belts during rough economic times, there is usually a meeting of the higher-ups to discuss how to get more out of employees. In this meeting, perhaps a brilliant incentive program is developed that dictates that if the crew can increase productivity 20%, they will get a 20% bonus. Success is all but guaranteed, right? Now all the company has to do is sit back and watch the numbers rise.
In his new book, Drive, Dan Pink presents study after study that proves that “if, then” bonus programs fail to increase anything except failure. This “reward-and-punishment” system—Pink calls it Motivation 2.0—is one that may have worked during the factory era but, as all things do, times have changed. Currently, Pink suggests, the laws of behavioral economics have expanded to include intrinsic motivation, or Motivation 3.0. Motivation 3.0 is the reason Wikipedia and Firefox, and all other open source systems, exist and flourish. It is Motivation 3.0 that has driven the creation of products and services that have been produced and maintained by people who work on them because they like to do the work, not because they are getting bonuses—or even paid—for their labor.
The aforementioned treatise on motivation is the first third of this masterly written book. Part Two deals with the three elements that can actually affect results when trying to implement this new kind of motivation within an organization—or tap into it personally. We, as workers, strive for autonomy—to be self-directed. We also are drawn to mastery—an urge to get better at what we do. And, finally, we desire purpose—to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Though this entire book offers terrific insights for managers and workers alike, Part Three is the real treasure. Pink calls it the “Type I Toolkit” and it truly is the ultimate resource to help you get motivated or improve focus in an organization. Within it, he offers useful advice to parents and educators, and presents a reading list of 15 important books to study and a discussion guide with conversation starters to get the dialogue going.
Pink taps into a crucial aspect of work production in this book, using a fine balance of academic research and enticing storytelling to engage and educate readers. I have been a fan of Dan Pink’s from the beginning, and I think this is his best book yet.
Posted Dec. 10, 2009 8:05 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
I recently stumbled upon one of those rare books that made me snap to attention. It came to us as a nondescript advance copy from a publisher not known as a heavy-hitter in the business book world, and was authored by an anthropologist. Not the typical recipe for success, but in Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, Grant McCracken offers a fresh take on the impact of culture on the corporation.
McCracken makes the point quickly and persuasively that corporations must let go of the belief that only the genius of big corporate gurus—such as Steve Jobs, Martha Stewart, and Richard Branson—can zero in on culture, even though they almost seem to dictate it. Gurus only appear to be indispensible, he argues, using Steve Jobs and Apple as an example: “As long as culture is ignored by business schools, C-suites, big brands, and consulting houses, Jobs looks great. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king (even in sneakers, jeans, and black turtlenecks).” Today’s “Corporations live or die by their connection to culture,” McCracken asserts, and in a perfect world, businesses would not need to rely on finding gurus. Instead, they would have an expert and highly professionalized Corporate Culture Officer (CCO) to supply cultural intelligence.
McCracken is an astute observer of human behavior and an entertaining storyteller, and his book offers ample examples of people who take on the role of CCO and what can be learned from their experiences. He tells the story of Lance Jensen of Volkswagon who saw that culture wasn't caught in a downward cycle, and believed that cultural intelligence encouraged smarter viewers and vice versa. With that, the famous “Pink Moon” and “Synchronicity” commercials were born. McCracken also shares the success stories of A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble, Chris Albrecht at HBO and Dan Wieden for Nike, and makes a convincing point that by investing their time into understanding the culture, these creative folks did not waste time creating gimmicks, stunts or tricks to capture audiences attention. McCracken then moves into a dissection of “Philistines”—the enemies of culture, those who watch the bottom line instead of the world around them—and how to deal with resistance to culture-based ideas. He wraps up the book nicely with a concrete toolkit for the budding CCO.
Grant McCracken gives readers a perfect blend of popular and more obscure cultural trends, great storytelling, and practical application, and in the process makes a strong case that he is this generation’s Chief Culture Officer.
Posted Nov. 16, 2009 3:32 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Even though Too Big to Fail was written during the same year as the recent financial collapse occurred, Andrew Ross Sorkin has written what I predict will be the definitive book on the subject. It not only tells a gripping “perfect storm” story—with all the gory details as our 401k’s disappeared and our financial system became nationalized included—but the author humanizes all the players, resulting in an imminently readable, albeit lengthy, book.
Each of the major players are shown here—warts and all. Sorkin takes us inside of Henry Paulson’s mind as the Secretary of the Treasury tries to get a grip on the collapse of the investment banks. We see Timothy Geithner “clearly overwhelmed, his eyes darting around his office as he nervously twisted a pen between his fingers.” And Ben Bernanke who sits “politely nodding in his best professorial manner.”
Most riveting are Sorkin’s descriptions of the meetings between the government representatives and the heavy-hitting and heavily-hit CEOs, bringing to mind Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s classic, Barbarians at the Gate. Sorkin describes a call to arms between financial competitors to save such institutions as Lehman, Bank of America, and AIG before the government would get involved this way: “The CEOs had all been milling about, tapping away on their BlackBerrys, and pouring themselves cups of ice water to cool themselves from the miasma of humidity that hung in the [New York Federal Reserve Building]. After the meeting, “the bankers left expressionless and mute, dumbstruck at the magnitude of the work that lay before them.”
Sorkin does not act as only a dispassionate observer, however, and includes his own informed deductions. “Unless those regulations are changed radically … there will continue to be firms that are too big to fail. And when the next, inevitable bubble bursts, the cycle will only repeat itself.” It’s a sobering reflection, but a critical reminder that there is still extreme risk involved when there is extreme reward at stake.
For this kind of book to work, the secret is effective story telling. Bob Woodward has done this kind of reporting for years, and Theodore White’s great The Making of the President series that started in 1960 is the father of the genre. Now Andrew Sorkin has now joined them. Great stories, detailed insider information; it is what places this book among the greats.
Posted Nov. 13, 2009 5:18 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
This could be the shortest Jack Covert Selects ever: Great book; end of story; next!
Well, let me offer a little more information to help explain my enthusiasm. Levitt and Dubner are the authors of the international best selling Freakonomics, a book that transcended the business book genre because of its approachable economics lessons via quirky storytelling. Superfreakonomics is more of the same, but unlike most sequels, the same is quite welcome and can stand tall on its own merits.
First and foremost, Superfreakonomics offers more of Levitt and Dubner’s “read to the stranger in the seat next to you” stories. These stories make accessible rather arcane economic terms like “price discrimination” and “the principal-agent problem” and the examples used to illustrate these terms are fun, unexpected and memorable. Thumb through the chapters, “How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?” and “Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance?” and you’ll quickly get the picture.
No one can accuse Levitt and Dubner of playing it safe with their material. As well as using rather esoteric subject matter, they also tackle such topics as the often sensitive and still confounding issue of why women MBAs earn less than men. Ultimately, they discover that it may come down to the fact “that many women, even those with MBAs, love kids.” They explain that women MBAs with children work 24 percent fewer hours than men (this after experiencing the obvious job discontinuity that comes with having a child) and that this slows down their career trajectory.
The authors’ also argue, rather convincingly, that it is safer to drive drunk than to walk home from the bar—with the obvious caveat that “a drunk walker isn’t likely to hurt or kill anyone other than her- or himself.” Using government statistics, they find that on a per-mile basis, “a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.”
They’ve taken the most heat (no pun intended) from environmentalists for suggesting that we can possibly “geoengineer” our way out of global warming, and challenging the dogma that reducing emissions is the only way to save the planet. Uncomfortable deductions? Yes. But you won’t soon forget them and they will certainly make you look at what principles fuel our culture a bit differently.
As with Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use sharp analysis, unpredictable stories and discomforting deductions to enlighten (and delight) readers. The authors have also done something that is very hard to do: they have created a second book that is as good, if not better than, the first one.
