Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, 288p, $24.00, Hardcover, April 2007, ISBN 9780805082111
Innovation research shows that almost every major innovation has an origin outside the industry it impacts. Amazon.com did not originate from a savvy retailer, just as the iPod was not developed by the consumer electronics industry. Looking for inspiration outside your normal avenues can be helpful and, in this recommendation, we take you outside the realm of business books.
Atul Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker and his first book, Complications, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. He writes about the difficulties facing medicine, and he has a great vantage point as a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. His new book, Better, is about the quest to improve the status quo, and in medicine, this translates directly into saved lives. Gawande suggests there are three aspects to the struggle to improve: diligence, doing it right and ingenuity.
His survey starts with one of the biggest killers in hospitals: bacterial infection. Over two million people every year acquire infections while in the care of a hospital, and 90,000 die as a result. The single best way to reduce the spread of infection is medical professionals washing their hands. With nurses seeing 20 patients an hour, it is nearly impractical to stop for a 60 second scrubbing before each patient. Gawande’s hospital was able to improve compliance from 40% to 70% with the introduction of an alcohol-based gel. But here’s the kicker: there was no change in the infection rates. A hospital in Pittsburgh struggling with the same problem created an initiative modeled after a Vietnamese anti-starvation program that used positive deviance: get the successful minority to tell the majority how to change. With the implementation of this approach, the hospital eliminated–completely–wound infections, and the program is now being tried in other hospitals.
While the backdrop from Better is the field of medicine, the continuous improvement message fits whether you are building pick-up trucks or servicing computer networks. Business people can learn from this book about health care, just as the Pittsburgh hospital learned from the Vietnamese village, and be reminded that getting better is a universal quest.

Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity
By: Michael Lee Stallard, with Carolyn Dewing-Hommes and Jason Pankau, Thomas Nelson, 230 pages, $22.99 Hardcover, July 2007. ISBN 9780785223580
Great leadership is something we think is easy to recognize, but it can be a hard thing to define. In Fired Up or Burned Out, Michael Lee Stallard does just that by explaining the type of culture great leaders create, and also the traits leaders use to create it. As Stallard himself states, we only remain motivated and engaged at work for so long using traditional motivational speeches and incentives. He suggests altering the workplace itself, creating an organization connecting employees with each other and the mission, values, and outlook of the organization. Given a goal and a vision, the workforce of such an organization will organically inspire and engage itself. We like to think that we have created this kind of company in a third floor office in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, and that this has had everything to do with our success.
Explaining early on why it’s so important to create a workplace culture that engages workers (and where they engage each other), he states:

The Gallup Organization conservatively estimates the annual economic cost to the American economy from the approximately 22 million American workers who are extremely negative or “actively disengaged” to be between $250 and $300 billion. This figure doesn’t include the cost for employees who are disengaged but have not spiraled down to the level of active disengagement.

Beyond that sobering fact, government and private research organizations are expecting a shortage of between 10 to 35 million workers in the American market lasting through the first half of the century. Stallard’s 230 pages pack plenty of inspiration to lead the kind of organization that can attract and retain workers in this difficult environment, and he discusses the practical skills necessary to do it. The book is broken up into four parts. In the first three sections, Stallard discusses how to engage workers in the workplace, how to create a great overall work culture, and the traits that make a great leader. In the fourth part, “Learn from Twenty Great Leaders Over Twenty Days,” he shares twenty stories of great leadership, along with quick applications of each one. His stories aren’t confined to this part of the book, though. He illustrates his ideas throughout the book using a wealth of historical examples and with stories from sports and the business world. If you feel like you or your organization is burned out and needs to be reignited, pick up this title.