Book Summary | The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Book Title: The Checklist Manifesto : How to get things right 
Author: Atul Gawande 

Today we live in a complex world with many systems and process interacting with each other. We knowingly or unknowingly use checklist as an integral part of our daily activities, from birth at hospital to graveyard. Check list is one of the widely used and basic Quality Control Tool. The author has shared examples of application of checklists in wide industry from airline, construction, investments, hospitality, hotels and into health care. This book will not help anyone to develop a checklist, but provides great insights on checklist and disciplined process for following will help to achieve or gets things right. 

Today we use checklist for many activities, just to ensure that we have completed the activity. Fifteen years ago, Israeli scientists published a report about patient care in ICU. It was observed that in a day, on an average 178 individual actions are required ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lung. Every activity posed risks. On an average 2 errors per patient per day was recorded. With many diseases can health care accept 2 errors per day ?  Can this be reduced? Can checklist become useful …?

Before the world war II, Boeing developed a plane that could carry five times as many bombs as the army requested. It could fly faster than previous bomber using four engines.  During the trial it crashed. The crash of the airplane made Boeing into bankruptcy. An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to pilot error due to pilot has to attend to the four engines, each with its own oil fuel mix, the retractable landing gear, the wing flaps, electric trim tabs and regulated hydraulic controls. It was too much airplane for one man to fly. 
The US army purchased few Boeing and tried to  overcome this, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach; they created a pilot’s checklist. Using a checklist for take-off to safe landing. With checklist in hand the pilots went to fly the model 299 without any accident. Because flying the behemoth, the army gained decisive air advantage in the world war, enabling its devastating bombing camping across Germany. Checklist seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit.

In 2001, critical care specialist Peter Pronovost decided to give a doctors checklist in Johns Hopkins Hospital.  Following the checklist resulted in line infection rate to zero from eleven percent within ten days.

There are good checklists and bad Checklists.

Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.

Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.” 

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.” 

The best example of application of checklist is crash landing of the airplane in the icy Hudson riven 2009. They followed the protocols for such situations.

Ticking the boxes is not the ultimate goal of the checklist. Embracing a culture of team work and discipline is. What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

Book Summary | The VUCA Company - Suhayl Abidi, Manoj Joshi

Book Title: The VUCA Company
Authors : Suhayl Abidi, Manoj Joshi
Publication: Jaico


Don't read success stories, you will get only message. Read failures stories, you will get some ideas for success - A P J Abdul Kalam.

Aristotle famously said, that the gods first send 40 years of prosperity to whoever they intended to destroy. It is well proven from the history of men that success leads to complacency which leads to decline. That is why one must be most alert and watchful at the peak of success. The successful organizations sows its own seeds of destruction. The VUCA ( Volatility, Uncertainty, Complex and Ambiguity) are the jargon's that is widely used in the Management when business is in stress due to many factors.  The authors of this book have considered Indian companies which experienced failures post liberalization due to VUCA. The best part of the book, is the author has provided key insight on how companies can learn from these organizations failures to over come complacency. 

Although the word VUCA was defined by the Americans during the war and much conceptualized by the management professionals, The author has used Indian companies which underwent downside in the business and analyzed why these companies need to face turbulent times as well as closeout. Today the average life of S&P index companies has drastically reduced over the years.  Leaders  must be absolutely clear that the reasons that helped to succeed in the past will not guaranty the future success as the business context has changed.  In a vuca world, the faster the world changes, the more firmly the organization should be anchored to its vision. 

#Resilience and agility cannot be taught but can be learnt. Behavioral changes, rather than just acquiring new companies and skills must be emphasized. 

# Failure ! The fear of failure is a world wide phenomenon, experiencing it is inevitable and running away from it is only human. It is said that if you want to learn about success, talk to a successful person, but if you want to learn about failures, talk to a very successful person.

# Leadership involves the readiness to make decisions, the courage to take risks the willingness to collaborate and to support others to support creativity and the ability to speak ones mind. 

# In the VUCA world, resilience and adaptability are the two attributes that distinguish leaders from mere mangers. 

# When you stop learning, we stop developing and we stop growing. Thats the end of a leader.

# If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you wont fail. You'll just stagnate and thats failure by erosion. 

# Ignorance and arrogance unforgivable to anyone or any organization.

# The path of success lies in the understanding the relevant trends, figuring out how your strengths and resources can capitalize on them and staking our a leadership position. 

# 3 C's are most important - Culture | Code of conduct |Control. 
culture is critical. it is important to remain committed to your organisations mission, to define core values and to act with integrity in accordance with those values. 
Arrogance leads to over confidence. Not only leaders become arrogant, but organization culture too starts taking the same he as dissentters are slowly eased out and debates disappear. overconfidence isn't a personality trait or a moral failing, but a natural consequence of success that affects almost every one . As we grow older and more experienced, we overrate the accuracy of our judgments. 

# Success can be achieved in two ways. One is like climbing a ladder. It is fast, but a ladder can be unstable and you can fall from where you started from. The other is climbing a mountain, where you experience descent as well as plateau on your way to the peak. 

# The causes of failure can be classified into 1. Human or behavioral 2. Systemic or organisational. 
The behavioral causes - Arrogance or Hubris :- Most failures are self inflicted wounds that are allowed to fester and ultimately poison the leader and his organisation. Hubris, the sin of overweening pride or arrogance is invariably the basic condition that undermines societies and individuals. 
According to Tim Irwin, in his book derailed, he charter the highs and lows of Six CEO's there are 4 qualities that are tied to failures - Authenticity | Self Management | Humility |Courage 

Derailed leaders progress through 5 stages - A failure of self / other awareness | Hubris : Pride before the fall | Missed early warning signals | Rationalizing | Derailment 

# Assumptions, beliefs, mindsets and blind-spots. 
- Successful people are more prone to assumptions as they start believing that they have somehow discovered the formula for success. 
- poor leaders are hired due to poor competency framework 

Failure is not a catastrophe, but failure to learn certainly can be, some of the case studies shared in the book is from the organisation such as Kodak, Motorala, Lehman Brothers, Jain Irrigation, Venky's chicken, Suzlon, King Fisher Airlines, Nokia etc. 

# KODAK - The success had blinded the company into denial that digital photography would replace the film roll. Kodak fits the classic profile of a twentieth century corporate dinosaur. 

# Motorola - The arrogance of technological superiority is deeply ingrained in culture and iridium went forward single mindedly concentrating on satellite design and launch, brushing aside the challenges in marketing and sales. 


# Lehman Brothers - Single minded goal to be no.1, he had little time and consideration for his clients and stakeholders

# Jain irrigation core lesson - Early success had blinded us and we thought we could do no wrong. Diversifying into unknown areas without required management bandwidth and eyeing disproportionate growth using debt is not sustainable.