Atul Gawande discusses performance at Authors@Google


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About Atul Gawande and the Talk
Atul Gawande discusses his latest book, "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance." Dr. Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, is the author of "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science", a regular contributor to The New Yorker (where he wrote a wonderful article on "The Checklist"), and was named a MacArthur fellow in 2006. This event took place at Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters on May 1, 2007, as part of the Authors@Google series.

He identified four attributes of top performers:
  1. Diligence - attention to details.
  2. Surveillance - measure and look for failures.
  3. Do the right thing, despite obstacles.
  4. Day-to-day creativity.

Other notes from his talk and the Q&A session:
  • Weekly meetings to discuss problems and solutions - patients get to benefit from the wisdom of the entire team.
  • Information technology to measure, notice problems, and spread information.
  • Look at ourselves as a process and engineer down the problems.
  • Measure ourselves - it's both simpler and scarier than we think.
  • Leadership is important and can affect everyone else - identify leaders!
  • Transparency - expose the best, so the rest can learn from them.
(HT Farnam Street for the great find.)

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