The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

A new book just out – “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” authored by Harvard Medical School professor Atul Guwande – makes a compelling case for the use of simple but powerful checklists: a means to ensure that proper steps are implemented and adhered to so as to prevent costly downstream mistakes. As this article summarizes, failure, Guwande argues, results not so much from ignorance (not knowing enough about what works) as from ineptitude (not properly applying what we know works). While the book uses examples taken largely from the medical field, its lessons hold true more broadly… across industries, and applicable to business operations, often process-rich and highly prone to error.