The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right

The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry, in ... » 

The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry, in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people, consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever advancing technologies, and still we fail. Now acclaimed writer and surgeon Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better and finds a solution in the most humble of places: the lowly checklist.

He explains how checklists have made possible some of the most difficult things people do, from flying airplanes to building skyscrapers of mind-boggling sophistication. And drawing on his own experience, he shows how applying this idea to the immenseley various and complex world of surgery produced a ninety-second checklist that reduced deaths and complications by more than one third in eight hospitals around the world, at virtually no cost and for almost any kind of operation. «