The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. New York: Picador, 2009.

Many of the things in our modern world are very complex. Little things done are not done, especially by the experts who undertake some of the most complex tasks, can have significant results. Surgeon Atul Gawande suggests a solution for managing this complexity and making sure that those important, little things aren’t overlooked. His solution is the checklist.

The thread through his book, The Checklist Manifesto, is the development by the World Health Organization (WHO) of a surgical checklist. WHO wanted to reduce surgical complications, especially in the third world. The team they put together, including Dr. Gawande, eventually settled on a checklist.

It was met with much skepticism, even on the part of those who developed it. The results changed minds. Use of the checklist cut serious complications from surgery almost in half. Dr. Gawande recounts his own experiences using the checklist and how it helped him prevent and solve surgical problems.

The checklist isn’t purely a matter for medicine. A very successful user of checklists is the aviation industry.

Aviators were once like surgeons, seen as virtuosos who drew upon skill, daring and intelligence to perform their jobs. Airplanes eventually became to complex for pilots, as the book illustrates in the case of a once experimental military craft. The pilots who took on the new airplane looked for ways to succeed, and survive, where their successors hadn’t. Rather than more training or expertise, the fallback of many professionals, they looked to the checklist. Use of checklists have become standard in aviation, where it checklist making has been much refined.


An interesting chapter deals with the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River a few years ago. Dr. Gawande praises the skill of the pilot and crew. He also points out, as the crew of the flight always have, the importance of the procedures they used, and especially the checklists that helped them to implement those procedures.

Through several examples, the outline of what make a good checklist and the cases where they work best are show. There isn’t yet and exact science to making checklists, but there is a well-developed art, which includes testing and revision.

It takes a dose of humility to accept that checklists can help highly trained professionals do their jobs better. Dr. Gawande seems to hope his fellow surgeons can show some the humility shown by pilots and allow checklist to become a tool for improving their work.

I come from a background in engineering and this makes sense to me. A procedure is designed much like anything else. If there are critical elements in anything, it is wise to reinforce them in ways that ensure their performance. The human mind is capable of amazing things, but can’t necessarily be relied on to remember to turn off the lights or stove or do any number of other little things.

I’ve also worked in the regulatory field, and seen thoughtless, narrow adherence to rules bring about undesirable results, sometime contrary to what the rules intended. This is not at all in the spirit of The Checklist Manifesto. A good checklist ensures consistency and quality while at the same time freeing the minds of its users to creative deal with the complexities of their task.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Awakening the Entrepreneur Within by Michael Gerber

The Wright Brothers by David McCollough

Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright rose to fame at the beginning of the 20^th Century by building the first successful manned, powered flying machine. In popular culture, they tend to be presented as geniuses who went out to Kitty Hawk and started flying one day. In his biography of these men, The Wright Brothers, David McCollough does not dispel the notion of genius, but he focuses on their courage, determination, careful study, methodical approach, and persistence in the pursuit of something they believed could be.

As boys, the brothers were inspired by a toy to consider the possibility of flight. As grown men, they made a careful study of it. Before beginning their experiments, they gathered the available information, including contacts with earlier experimenters in flight such as Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley (the director of the Smithsonian Institute who’s “aerodrome” was a failed early flyer). When they began conducting their own experiments with kites (and later using a small wind tunnel they made), they found the published data to be lacking in useful or correct information.

Therefore, it was mainly on their own that the brothers invented their flyers and the means of piloting them. They had the practical view that inventing a flying machine included inventing the method for controlling it in flight.

An interesting note is that the Wrights funded their experiments and first airplanes with their own money. Their bicycle shop must have produced a decent income, but they lived modestly. They lived in a modest home together with their father and sister until after they completed built three working airplanes, the third model being the one they demonstrated publicly. Even after they began to make money making airplanes and decided to build a new, larger house, they shared it. Wilbur’s only request for the new house was that he have his own bedroom and bathroom.

McCollough emphasizes how much the success of Wilbur and Orville was a family affair. They were close to their widowed father, who survived Wilbur by two years. Once they began to demonstrate their airplane and make a build a business on it, their sister Katherine became a social manager for them, and she share a house with Orville until she married at the age of 52 (she passed away three year later). Orville had a long life and saw many improvements in aviation after he sold the company, including Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the use of bombers in World War II.

The book is fairly brief. McCollough concentrates on the period when the Wrights were most involved in experimenting with, building, and ultimately demonstrating their invention. Even so, one gets a sense of what the brothers and their immediate family and friends were like.

David McCollough also wrote The Great Bridge. 

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Alexander Graham Bell is obviously known for his invention of the telephone. He started his career teaching the deaf to speak using a set of tools developed by his father. This career lead the Scotch-Canadian teacher (Bell became an American citizen in 1882) to meet an American girl, Mabel Hubbard, who he would marry. Helen Elmira Waite tells the story of their life together in Make a Joyful Noise.

Mabel Hubbard lost her hearing at the age of five after being ill with scarlet fever. Her parents were determined that she would continue to speak and understand speech. They were encouraged by news from Germany that schools there were teaching the deaf to speak, but there was little support for it in the United States. Even so, they arranged for a teacher who had the courage to try and Mabel learned to speak and read lips.

Gardiner Hubbard, Mabel’s father, was a businessman and politician in Massachusetts. He became an advocate for the education of the deaf, especially oral education (speech and lip reading). As a child, Mabel testified to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to demonstrate what a deaf child could learn.

Bell set us a school for the deaf in Boston. Here he was introduced to Mabel, whose family hoped his techniques could help her achieve a more natural speech. He began experimenting with the idea of pushing more signals down telegraph wires, which lead to his invention of the telephone. Gardiner Hubbard became one of Bells backers in these efforts. Even though Bell grew to spend more time developing his telephone, and later testing designs for aviation, he always remained active in education for the deaf.

The Bell family authorized Waite’s biography. The advantage of this is that she had access to family records and the recollections of the Bells’ children and grandchildren. The possible downside is that Waite may have been inclined to present the Bells in the best light. Waite may have been inclined to do this anyway. In his preface, Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, mentioned that he and his wife Elsie, Bell’s oldest daughter, had read Waits biography of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan (the Bells knew these ladies and Bell himself encouraged Keller’s parents that she could be educated and connect to the wider world).

Waite does admit to Bell’s stubbornness and sometimes-excessive sense of propriety. If the Hubbards, particularly Mabel, had not pushed, persuaded, coerced, and even tricked Bell into promoting, protecting, and commercializing his invention, he may have tinkered in his shop making a better telephone that no one would use.

Waite’s style is almost conversational; she’s telling a story. I think Make a Joyful Noise is accessible to many younger readers. It is also interesting in that the book is as much about Bell’s private life, particularly his romance and marriage with Mabel, as it is about his invention. In addition, she demonstrates that Mabel was a remarkable and capable person on her own.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Waite, Helen Elmira. Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia: MacRae Smith Company, 1961.