Flint's Blog

The Checklist Manifesto

Every once in a while you read a book and you just can't help thinking - this one is a game changer.  The Checklist Manifesto is one of those books. It's a book with an unbelievably simple premise, the use of checklists improve decision making. OK, I know that seems obvious. However, it's really quite amazing how the author, Atul Gawande, demonstrates this in industries as diverse as medical, building, and airlines.

Everybody has heard the story of how Captain Sully Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January 2009. What little people realize is how from day one, pilots are taught to use checklists for just about everything - routine gate departures, rough weather landings, and even ditching your plane in a river.  When Sully was interviewed, he often would say "he was just doing his job". Sounds like a guy with a lot of humility.  But the reality was that he truly had trained for this.  After the plane lost both engines, the copilot immediately began running through checklists attempting to restart the engines, while Sully prepared to land in the river. 

Mr. Gawande is a trained surgeon.  Surgeons get more education and training than just about any other profession.  They perform hundreds of operations per year.  They save countless lives.  As Alec Baldwin said in the movie Malice, "When I'm in the operating room, I am God".

Unfortunately, medical errors are one of the leading causes of death in the United States.  One might think that because there are so many medical procedures, that of course there will be errors, that's just the percentages.  That is certainly true.  However, Mr. Gawande sets out to prove that these errors are avoidable  by implementing checklists at certain key times during any surgical procedures.  In what should be getting way more attention in the press, Mr. Gawande conducted a landmark study in 8 hospitals all over the world.  A baseline study was done to determine the number of errors that occur during surgery and recovery.  And then checklists were implemented. Surgeons didn't want them, they knew how to do their job, they had been educated, trained, and performed these operations before. However, the simple act of running through their version of the "pre-flight" checklist was mandated. The results are simply outstanding.  Less errors, less complications, more lives saved.  Not just a small percentage but drastic changes in error rates.

The building industry has known about checklists for a long time. That's why you don't hear about buildings falling down all the time.  Everything is on a checklist.

My key takeaway from the book is that checklists need to be a key part of what we do everyday at Billtrust, the outsourced billing company I work for.  We already have checklists at some places  - our Project Management team has one they call the "Business Requirements Document" that they use to onboard new customers.  But I know our sales team doesn't.  Why not have one including key steps like: 

• Identified all the key decision makers - check.  
• Do I know who has to sign the contract - check.  
• Have they bought into the cost savings analysis - check.

This blog post certainly doesn't do the book justice.  I would recommend this book to just about anybody who wants to improve their business.  It will also be the first book in my 25 year career that I'm going to mandate that all of my managers read.  You should too.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

 I just finished reading "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman".  I've read several of Jon Krakauer's previous books and always found them incredibly thought provoking.  This book did not disappoint.

At a high level, it's the story of Pat Tillman, a football player from the Arizona Cardinals, who decided to quit professional football, give up a multi-million dollar contract and join the war against terrorism with the Army Rangers.  He did this with very little fanfare, refusing to give any press conferences.  He was killed by friendly fire in 2004.  This much I knew before reading the book.

I have always had a deep respect for people in the Armed Services.  I try to say thank you to people in uniform whenever I see them.  I had even contemplated joining the Army as a junior in high school, visiting a recruitment center and taking a placement test.  Say what you will about the political decisions involved with war, the people on the ground are heroes in my mind.

I had wanted to read the book because I was fascinated that someone would quit the NFL and enlist in the army. How would you make a decision like that?  Was Pat Tillman crazy, patriotic, adventure seeking?  

The book is really about a lot of things.  It's the story of Pat Tillman, a selfless athlete who had bigger things to conquer than football.  It's the story of how incredibly inept the military can be at times.  It's the story of how Afghanistan is a place you just can't ever win a war.  And ultimately it's really a story of how Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire was completely manipulated into a publicity stunt by the government to turn the press in their favor.  The fact that he was killed by friendly fire was kept from his brother who was in his Army unit, kept from his family, and covered up for months while it was bilked for maximum media coverage.

If you don't have time for the book, you can get a lot of the details at his wikipedia page.  Definitely not a feel good book but a great read nonetheless.

Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint

I just finished reading Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint: How to Sell Yourself and Your Ideas by  Christopher Witt.  I was expecting to read about how evil PowerPoint is and how it has turned everybody into generic presenters.  However, it really isn't an anti-PowerPoint book.  It's an extremely well written book about how to give a great, engaging presentation whether you're presenting to a small room or an auditorium full of people. 

The best takeaway that I think you can get from the book is that no two presenters are the same.  You're doing yourself and your audience a huge disservice if you try to model your presentation after another successful presenter.  You need to find out what works best for you based on your own personality traits.

There are a lot of other great tips that aren't buried in useless anecdotes like a lot of other business books. 

I like to think that I'm a fairly good presenter but after reading this book, I might need to reevaluate.

If you've ever sat through a presentation where the presenter is reading the bullets on his/her PowerPoint slides, or even worse, if you are that presenter, I would strongly recommend you give this book a read.

Freakonomics for Randomness

I read this great book over the weekend that reminds me a lot of Freakonomics.  It's called The Drunkard's Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  If you haven't heard  of Freakonomics, it was a runaway bestseller and described how economics intersects with everyday life - everything from the drop in New York City crime rates to the fixing of Sumo fights.

The Drunkard's Walk starts with a basic primer on probabilities with a little history lesson thrown in and then quickly moves in to some real world examples. 

One of the more interesting ones is The Monty Hall Problem.  Monty Hall was the host of a TV game show called Let's Make A Deal.  He would offer contestants the chance to win a car by picking one of three curtains.  Behind one of the curtains would be a car and the other two curtains would have a goat.  After the contestant selected a curtain, Monty would open one of the other curtains and reveal one of the goats.  At this point, Monty would give you the chance to switch the curtain you selected to the other remaining one.  The question is, what would you do?  Since I was a math geek, I of course knew the answer was it didn't matter, you had a 50-50 chance at that point of winning the car.  Apparently an overwhelming majority of math professors in the US also agreed.  And that's where we would all be wrong.  You're actually far better off switching to the other curtain.  Here's why. If  you select Curtain 1 and decide not to switch,  you have a 1 out of 3 chance of getting the car.  However, if you do switch, you have a 2 out of 3 chance of getting the car.  The Wikipedia link above has much better explanation.

Other stories covered in the book are Wine Ratings (i.e. is there really a difference between an 89 and 92), why polling results are often misleading and where they get the +/- numbers, and how you can improve your SAT scores just by taking them a few more times.

Very good read, even if you're not a geek.