The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2009: With a title likeThe 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 Manifestois at once a restorative call to action and a welcome voice of reason. --Anne BartholomewAmazon Exclusive: Malcolm Gladwell ReviewsThe Checklist ManifestoMalcolm Gladwell was named one ofTIMEmagazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005. He is most recently the author ofWhat the Dog Saw(a collection of his writing fromThe New Yorker) as well as theNew York TimesbestsellersOutliers,The Tipping Point, andBlink. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review ofThe Checklist Manifesto:Over the past decade, through his writing inThe New Yorkermagazine and his booksComplicationsandBetter, 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--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.