High, high above the desert floor and a gleaming Las Vegas downtown as the sun set Tuesday evening at ASSE’s Safety 2013, Cintas Corporation hosted a reception atop the Stratosphere Hotel, the iconic needle in the sky in Vegas. The keynoter was Dr. Richard Fulwiler, the former worldwide head of health and safety at Procter and Gamble.
The rap against setting a goal of zero injuries is that workers know it is an impossibility, and will tune out further safety messages. Three different safety experts at ASSE’s Safety 2013 gave us almost identical definitions: First, you start by asking employees, “Can you go a day without an injury?” Well, yeah, probably.” So the day does go by without an injury.” Next you ask:
“Are we kidding ourselves?” Dr. Tom Krause, founder of BST and now an independent consultant, asked several hundred safety pros at a session at ASSE’s Safety 2013. Kidding about what? Dr. Krause’s point: low OSHA injury rates are deceiving many companies into believing they have better safety performance than is really the case.
The title of one Thursday session at ASSE’s Safety 2013: “Why Every Safety Professional/Manager Must Understand the Ideas of Peter F. Drucker,” presented by Jay C. Brakensiek, CSP, MSIH, EMBA, Claremont University Consortium, Claremont, CA. Brakensiek was a former student of Professor Drucker, considered the “Father of Management.”
Two sessions this week at ASSE’s Safety 2013 took up the subject of zero injury goals. The first was presented by Tom Krause Ph.D., the founder of BST who now works as an independent consultant in Ojai, CA after selling the company to Dekra of Germany. Tom posed the question: “Are We on the Path to Zero or Are We Kidding Ourselves?“
On Wednesday morning at ASSE’s Safety 2013 in Las Vegas a vexing, long-standing irritant to safety professionals is addressed by Canadian consultant Corrie Pitzer -- why safe organizations fail. Pitzer calls it “drifting into disaster.”
A business strategy guru, Richard Rumelt, is the opening session keynoter to kick of Day 2 of ASSE’s Safety 2013, Wednesday, June 26, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
ASSE’s Safety 2013 features a number of educational sessions on the topic of leadership. None probably will be looked forward to more than the session tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon on “Transformational Leadership - A Key Element in the Journey to World Class.” Transformational Leadership is a fancy term, but the presentation here is real world, involving
Take just a minute to reflect on what you believe are the characteristics that describe a transformational leader, and by the same token take another minute to reflect on the characteristics that describe a transactional leader.
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