When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
Interpretation
Collaboration among a team leads to success in achieving goals.
This quote by Atul Gawande highlights the importance of teamwork in any operation or project. When multiple individuals contribute effectively and harmoniously, the result is a beautifully coordinated effort, similar to a symphony where each player performs their role to achieve a common objective.
In practice
This quote can be used in a corporate meeting to emphasize the importance of collaboration among team members.
A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.
No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.
Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it.
Team members have to hold each other accountable. If there's a meeting, all members have to commit to be present and to help one another; they can't just check out when they feel they're not getting any benefits.
There is a new model of leadership in the world that rides on the premise that every single person in the organisation can be a leader. Titles are important for structure and order, but real power does not come from titles.
One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when suddenly someone needs a cop.
The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills.
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