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Talent Isn’t Enough To Deliver Your Best Work
The versatile productivity and quality tool that costs nothing
The single best tool for productivity and quality won’t cost you a cent. It’s not an app. It works better on paper than on your phone. There’s nothing to download and nothing to buy. Benjamin Franklin used a version of it to track his thirteen virtues.
Have you figured it out yet?
The best way to explain it is to show you how failure to use it can cost lives. You’ll see how the presence of this tool saves lives. Finally, you’ll see how everyday people like me use it for team-based projects like complex software deployments and writing sales letters and blog posts.
Mayday
On August 16, 1987, Northwest flight 255 crashed on takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The pilots neglected to extend the flaps and slats, a requirement for takeoff. But why? These were experienced pilots with over a thousand successful takeoffs between them. The NTSB concluded that the probable cause was the failure of the pilots to use the taxi checklist.
The Miracle
Atul Gawande, the author of The Checklist Manifesto, wrote a story how a medical team comprised of scores of people had to carry out thousands of steps…
