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.
We have no desire to be the world's policeman. But America does want to be the world's peacemaker.
When you're female working in a male-dominated industry, there are unfortunately extra things you need to do - for example, couch opinions in a way that sounds palatable and not threatening. That's a skill I developed.
I think playing cricket taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career.
Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.
I talked to the players and tried to make them aware of what was good and bad, but I didn't try to run their lives.
Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past - let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
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