A Longview, Washington company is citing a “safety first” management philosophy and a company-wide change in culture for the dramatic improvement in safety shown in a recently released sustainability report.

A conversation with E. Scott Geller, Ph.D., Alumni Distinguished Professor, Center for Applied Behavior Systems, Virginia Tech, on Actively Caring For People – AC4P – the subject of a new book Scott will introduce at the National Safety Congress in Orlando, Oct. 22-24. It is also available at www.ac4p.org.

The scene plays out in Western movies. The villain Jesse James, the most famous member of the James-Younger gang that terrorized the Minnesota area in the later 1800s, is shot in the back, defenseless, by a fellow member of his gang out to collect the bounty on James’ life.

It’s easy to write people off by their appearance.  Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t dress or speak like you.  Maybe they have different interests than you, your co-workers, or your friends.   Or as one of my business acquaintances often states, “they’re just special!”

One of my favorite Broadway musicals is “Les Misérables.” My favorite musical score for this powerful drama takes place when the hero, Jean Valjean, sings “Who am I?”

There is a very good chance that we have all heard that safety starts at the top. This is not a cliché’ as some may think. All safe workplace efforts must start with top management leading the way with a vision for the company.

The U.S. Department of Energy still has work to do to improve its own safety culture. That’s the upshot of a recent study on the federal agency that heads environmental cleanup of nuclear waste across the country, including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington.

Positive thinking is deeply embedded in American culture, and in American business culture. I’ve worked with enough magazine publishers and advertising sales reps who would be seriously non-productive if not for their “can do, will do” spirit. But here is a counter-intuitive thought: Psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who died in 2007, was a pioneer of the negative path, and he once said the best way to address an uncertain future is to focus on the worst that can happen, instead of the best-case scenario.

Virtually all catastrophic events in man-made systems are related to technical failures made possible by organizational failures. This explains why catastrophic events continue to occur despite widespread implementation of sophisticated technical and management systems. Deepwater Horizon and Texas City disasters are examples of events caused by weak organizational safety—the context within which technical and management systems function.