This is an excerpt from today’s SpikeSpeak. Join the group at www.spiketrade.com – and read emails from Alex and Kerry on a daily basis!

A book can have a life-changing impact on a person’s life. Several people said that to me regarding my books. I have certainly come in contact with books by others that have changed the trajectory of my life. I still have a book on my shelf during the reading of which I first got an idea to escape the USSR and come to America. I mean, I was ready for the idea, but the book provided that final straw that brought the structure together.

There have been business books that had a trajectory-changing impact on me. Today I want to share with you the latest of such volumes – The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande.

Gawande – a surgeon and a terrific writer – tracks the development of formal checklists to the 1930s aviation and the arrival of multi-engine planes:

“Flying this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of one person.” He continues “Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all. Checklists … provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit.”

As I read, I saw striking parallels with trading. “Checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of a cognitive net. They catch flaws of memory, attention, and thoroughness… They do not try to spell out everything. A checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps.”

Gawande interviews pilots, construction managers, physicians, and financiers in his checklist quest. He shares his own surgical checklist odyssey and provides do’s and don’ts for those who would create a checklist.

Reading this book I knew I would be designing ‘Elder safe trading checklist.’ How it went and how it turned out would be the topics for a future conversation. Discussing this with someone who never read the book and worked on his or her own checklist would be like discussing bicycling with someone who has never been on a bike. Read the book, start working on your own checklist – I would be delighted to exchange ideas with you!

AE