I am sure many of you have watched portions of the various “reality” programs that are so pervasive these days. The scenes are very well staged with close up video that is oh so perfect.
James Madison, fourth president of the United States, was instrumental in drafting the United States constitution. He warned against creating laws “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
There is no “I” in the word “team,” but according to one of our customers there is an “I” in safety – four of them, in fact. Four “I” words sum up what this customer believes it took to get his organization to begin the safety culture improvement journey.
Not that long ago, I opened the wrong email and got hacked into. My address book totally disappeared. My file system was corrupted and rendered useless. All those in my contact list received a message that my wife and I were being held hostage in Spain, and they needed to send off $2,500 to bail us out.
Over the years I have met a number of interesting people. One of my favorites is a person whom I consider to be a Canadian National Treasure, retired Major General Lewis MacKenzie.
You probably have heard a saying that goes something like “If you are safe, it is not by accident.” The world of inspirational posters continues to be an industry that papers our facility walls with good looking, feel good platitudes that have no real, positive impact on safety.
Recently, I heard a quotation that caused me to stop and reflect. It went something like “Life must be lived forward; unfortunately it can only be understood backward.”
Many of you are able to think back to your personal realities world in 1970. I was a recently graduated, just-married engineer working in an experimental pesticide development laboratory. An ongoing assignment dealt with how to get rid of our toxic wastes in (then legal) tidal area landfills of the San Francisco bay area.
I began to get deeply involved in helping organizations achieve safety culture excellence back in the 1980s. At that point in my career, I was in charge of manufacturing engineering for a Fortune 20 company.