Lesson 1: Set Clear Goals With OKRs | Atul Gawande
November 11, 2025
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3:31Now PlayingLesson 1: Set Clear Goals With OKRs | Atul Gawande
YouTube Description
as posted by the channelIn some video games, you get to set the level of difficulty that you want. Too easy and you’ll coast through feeling bored. Too hard, and you might throw your controller down in frustration. The trick is to find the sweet spot: a level that challenges you without feeling impossible. Surgeon Atul Gawande looks at setting goals for an organization in the same way. He says you should push your teams without setting them up to fail.
In this video lesson, Gawande describes a practical framework to keep your organization focused, aligned, and on track.
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About Atul Gawande:
Atul Gawande, MD, MPH is a renowned surgeon, author, and public health leader whose work explores how humans design and improve systems for better outcomes in complex environments. He is Professor of the Practice of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and holds the John and Cyndy Fish Chair in Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, which he co-founded and formerly chaired.
From January 2022 to January 2025, he served as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Gawande also co-founded Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery and anesthesia safer worldwide. From 2018-2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase healthcare venture.
A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, Gawande is the author of the best-selling books Complications (a National Book Award finalist), Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.
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