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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:
Other notes from his talk and the Q&A session:
He identified four attributes of top performers:
- Diligence - attention to details.
- Surveillance - measure and look for failures.
- Do the right thing, despite obstacles.
- Day-to-day creativity.
- 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.)
