Atul Gawande discusses performance at Authors@Google

2009-09-27T18:45:00.001+10:00

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About Atul Gawande and the Talk

Atul Gawande discusses his latest book, "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance." Dr. Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, is the author of "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science", a regular contributor to The New Yorker (where he wrote a wonderful article on "The Checklist"), and was named a MacArthur fellow in 2006. This event took place at Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters on May 1, 2007, as part of the Authors@Google series.

He identified four attributes of top performers:

Diligence - attention to details.
Surveillance - measure and look for failures.
Do the right thing, despite obstacles.
Day-to-day creativity.

Other notes from his talk and the Q&A session:

Weekly meetings to discuss problems and solutions - patients get to benefit from the wisdom of the entire team.
Information technology to measure, notice problems, and spread information.
Look at ourselves as a process and engineer down the problems.
Measure ourselves - it's both simpler and scarier than we think.
Leadership is important and can affect everyone else - identify leaders!
Transparency - expose the best, so the rest can learn from them.

(HT Farnam Street for the great find.)

Jamie Dimon's Speech at HBS Class Day 2009

2009-07-19T13:00:00.002+10:00

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., spoke at Harvard Business School Class Day 2009.

Brief summary available in HBS's Press Release.

Loyalty vs meritocracy

When someone isn't up to their job, loyalty to organization trumps loyalty to that person. I have seen a fair amount of loyalty to individuals in businesses. While the job may be important to that person (keeping in mind that, someday, that person might be me), keeping a person not suited to the job harms both employee morale and the business! Of course, everyone should be given the opportunity to grow and make mistakes. But at some point, hard as it may be, the right thing must be done.

My impression

I haven't dealt with JP Morgan Chase nor do I personally know anyone working there, but from watching Jamie speak and reading his 2008 JPM shareholder letter, if he does what he says and the entire company operates the same way, JP Morgan Chase is a place I would want to work!

Enoch Ko's Blog

Atul Gawande discusses performance at Authors@Google

Jamie Dimon's Speech at HBS Class Day 2009