November 11, 2025
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5:36Now PlayingYou’ve seen the scenes play out across sports. A figure skating coach provides a hand to hold onto while awaiting scores. A basketball coach dances into the locker room for a post-game celebration. A football coach gets drenched with a drink cooler. Behind every great athlete, it seems, is a good coach. But surgeon Atul Gawande says coaches are not just for athletes –– or for beginners. We could all benefit from having one.
In this video lesson, Gawande shares why coaching matters and how to make it a central part of your organization.
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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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