Better......

On average, a surgeon will perform as many operations a summer as a typical third baseman will throw to first base. But, when a third basemen makes a rare mistake, he is booed y the crowd and does it better next time. When a surgeon makes a rare mistake, people are permanently damaged and he is sued for exhorbitant sums.

This is the paraphrase of an observation made in the book I recently took in,"Better" by Atul Gawande. In the book, he also asks, "What does it take to be good at something when failure is so easy?"

Gawande is a cancer surgeon who researched how medicine can and is improving, how medicine is improving to become...better and the impact of these innovations, improvements and lack thereof on all our lives.

Among other interesting and provocative topics, Gawande discusses how handwashing improvements (believe it or not, even recent ones) have greatly reduced infections, how medical practices, not advances, have saved lives in Iraq, dicusses the issue of malpractice and the irrational tort system in the U.S. and other innovative practices, both recent and possibly future, have and will save lives.

This book, althought written primarily about the medical system, is very readable, accessible and has valuable lessons for anyone looking to improve their performance, professional systems or personal ability to innovate. A great read for anyone who is at all interested in getting, well, "Better".