Monday, June 3, 2013

The Checklist Manifesto

Yeah, it's a book about checklists. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, to me as well. But it felt like half of my Twitter feed was recommending it, so I finally got around to reading it. I'm glad I did.

The book isn't half as boring as it sounds. Author Atul Gawande does an excellent job bringing life to the importance of checklists. Whereas you probably recognize the importance of checklists for mundane tasks like, say, grocery shopping, Gawande describes a number of incredible cases where checklists saved lives. The fields of airplane piloting and medicine, for example, are showing much improved results following the use of checklists.

But Gawande also saves some room for discussing checklists in less-life-threatening fields, such as investing. I've made some slight changes in my investing process as a result of this book; I don't expect these changes to take up much time, but I do expect them to reduce mistakes that I may not have even known I was making. Any book that can do that, even if it's about a topic as mundane as checklists, was probably worth the read.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Far too many empoyees for a company this size8