Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right - Hardcover

Gawande, Atul

4.04

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9781846683138: Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846683130 ISBN 13: 9781846683138

Publisher: Profile Books, 2010

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The bestselling author of "Better" and "Complications" explores the significance of the lowly checklist, and how it has revolutionised medical practice and saved lives. Today we find ourselves in possession of stupendous know-how, which we willingly place in the hands of the most highly skilled and hardworking people. Yet avoidable failures are common, and the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of our knowledge has exceeded our ability to consistently deliver it to people - correctly, safely or efficiently. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument for the checklist, which he believes to be the most promising strategy in surmounting failure. He looks at how the checklist has allowed pilots to fly airplanes with more power and range than possible before; and how taking this idea to the complicated world of surgery produced a 90-second checklist that reduced surgical deaths and complications in eight hospitals around the world by more than one-third. Along the way, he will show how checklists (which cost next to nothing) actually work, and why some make matters worse while others make matters better. "The Checklist Manifesto" is a fascinating exploration on the nature of complexity in our lives - and how we can best overcome it.

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Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2009: With a title like The Checklist Manifesto, it would be natural to expect that Atul Gawande is bent on revolutionizing that most loved-hated activity of workers the world over: the to-do list. But it's not the list itself he wants to change; there are no programmatic steps or tables here to help you reshuffle daily tasks. What you'll find instead is a remarkably liberating and persuasive inquiry into what it takes to work successfully and with a personal sense of satisfaction. The first thing you'll realize is that it takes more than just one person to do a job well. This is a toppling revelation made all the more powerful by Gawande's skillful blend of anecdote and practical wisdom as he profiles his own experience as a surgeon and seeks out a wide range of other professions to show that a team is only as strong as its checklist--by his definition, a way of organizing that empowers people at all levels to put their best knowledge to use, communicate at crucial points, and get things done. Like no other book before it, The Checklist Manifesto is at once a restorative call to action and a welcome voice of reason. --Anne Bartholomew

Amazon Exclusive: Malcolm Gladwell Reviews The Checklist Manifesto

Malcolm Gladwell was named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005. He is most recently the author of What the Dog Saw (a collection of his writing from The New Yorker) as well as the New York Times bestsellers Outliers, The Tipping Point, and Blink. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Checklist Manifesto:

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world--and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don't know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it's just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists--literally--written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.

The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande’s book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions. It is neither. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help. --Malcolm Gladwell

About the Author:

One of the world's most distinguished doctors, Atul Gawande is a staff writer on the New Yorker, teaches surgery at Harvard Medical School and practises in Boston. He as advised President Clinton on health policies,and is also advisor to the WHO on surgery. The bestselling author of Better 9781861976574 and Complications 9781846681325, he has lectured in the UK and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

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