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
