The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

PBThe INew York Times/I bestselling author of IBetter/I and IComplications/I reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist/B/PPWe live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. /PPIn riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. /PPAn intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, IThe Checklist Manifesto/I is essential reading for anyone working to get things right. /P

strongAmazon Best Books of the Month, December 2009/strong: With a title like emThe Checklist Manifesto/em, 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, emThe Checklist Manifesto/em is at once a restorative call to action and a welcome voice of reason. --emAnne Bartholomewbr /br //em span class="h1"strongAmazon Exclusive: Malcolm Gladwell Reviews iThe Checklist Manifesto/i/strong/span br/ br/ bMalcolm Gladwell was named one of iTIME/i magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005. He is most recently the author of iWhat the Dog Saw/i (a collection of his writing from iThe New Yorker/i) as well as the iNew York Times/i bestsellers iOutliers/i, iThe Tipping Point/i, and iBlink/i. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of iThe Checklist Manifesto/i:/b br/ p img align="right" border="0" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/macmillan-gms/gladwell-300.jpg"/ pOver the past decade, through his writing in iThe New Yorker/i magazine and his books iComplications/i and iBetter/i, 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, iThe Checklist Manifesto/i, 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./p pGawande 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./p pThe 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. i--Malcolm Gladwell /i/pbr/ hr size="1"