John Lennon's To Do List

Even the rich and famous find a need to make to do lists. Maybe they are rich and famous because they make to do lists. Below is a To Do list handwritten by John Lennon. For sure it is a way to keep from forgetting things. A principle of Cowboy Safety is to have some way to keep track of what needs to be done. When we learn the wrong way to do something we should make a record so that we do not repeat that mistake. I find that 3x5 cards are a good way to do this. 

David Sneed 

Cowboy Safety Thanks

I am thankful for the ability to recognize the abundance that the Lord has provided.

In one specific area, I am thankful for the ability to see what safety can be. I believe that there are many new jobs, my number is 5 million jobs, related to safety in this post-industrial era. I believe that safety is one of the best investment opportunities that there is. Safety is a new world of abundance. To recognize how that can be the first step is to acknowledge that the industrial era is over. We have some industrial era jobs left but they are mostly staffed with people who are  not of the industrial era.

Two encouraging things happened in November 2011. Whether or not either of them produces any results does not matter. What matter is that something is happening.

The National Safety Council announced that it would have a separate Young Professionals track at its 2012 Congress and Expo for presenters and attendees under 40. I hope that this track succeeds and is well attended. I am most anxious to see the answer to the question "Why is safety different to those under 40?" These are the folks who did not know the Industrial Era or its attitudes.

I had a chance in November to be a policy wonk. It was fun but I don't want to do it all the time. I met with a man who is in an appointed position one notch from the Oval Office. He has known politics all his life because his father was in politics and came very close to becoming the President a number of years back. Also at the meeting were two senior career government executives. We talked of the way that these 5 million new jobs would work. The questions were good and they were answered. We talked of the regulatory issues involved and there was talk of the politics. Most importantly we talked about how these jobs work well with new grads, with retirees, and as well with those doing the hiring. In these jobs there is no wasted time so the effective pay rate per hour is quite good. Government subsidies are not needed.

There is something that both of these events have in common. They both represent change and there are those who will oppose any change. Do those under 40 know something that those over 40 do not? If there are 5 million new jobs in safety what will they displace? Do either or both of these events mean that there might be a whole new way of doing safety?

Let's all be thankful that in the United States there is still hope.

David Sneed

Scrooge and Cowboy Safety

Yesterday we went to see Scrooge, the musical version of Christmas Carol, at the Candlelight Dinner Theatre in Johnstown Colorado where we have season tickets. It was a great performance.

What amazes me about this play is that so many Christians do not understand that the theme of Christmas Carol is the opposite of Christianity. Scrooge becomes aware of his sin and his future in hell then decides he can achieve salvation through good works. His deeds are so good that it is easy to see that this must be the best way. In the sequel to the play we might see Scrooge on Monday become the Chairman of the Board of Deacons after making his promised donation of a hundred guineas. Yet no amount of defense can show that Scrooge accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

God wants us to acknowledge our sin and get our soul fixed through the blood of Christ. After that we can change our act through His grace. Giving is certainly a Christian act. Born-again Christians would do well to model the acts of Scrooge.

The Bible says that "faith without works is dead." But faith does not come by works. "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. "

David Sneed

Cowboy Safety and Resource Value

A teenager lost a contact lens while playing basketball in the driveway. After a fruitless search, he went inside and told his mother the lens was nowhere to be found. Undaunted she went outside. In a few minutes she returned with the lens in her hand. "How did you manage it Mom?" the teenager asked. "We weren't looking for the same thing," she replied. "You were looking for a small piece of plastic. I was looking for $150."

Too often we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. 

The Cowboy Safety philosophy, that learns from the past, established values for every resource, tangible and intangible. This process is not immediately obvious. Once learned it is not easily forgotten. 

David Sneed

Cowboy Safety Means Using Another Viewpoint

Here is a video of the earth created from photos taken from the International Space Station  at an altitude of 240 miles. Is it what you think it should be? Does it make you think of the earth in new ways?

I remember when one of my sons, age about 3, made his first flight from Thomas Green Airport in Providence RI. Maybe 15 seconds after take-off he said "I can see the whole world!"

David Sneed


Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

OSHA Willful Violations FY 2011

For the 12 months ending 9/30/11, OSHA has listed the 10 most frequent willful violations. These activities are quite common and consume the greatest amount of time and expense. All are easy to violate and it may well be that most people do violate them.

When safety is viewed in a holistic way these activities are so embedded that it is hard to know how to violate them. And since they are built into the cost and pricing of the products the employees have no pressure or incentive to violate them.

  1. Excavation
  2. Fall Protection
  3. Process safety management
  4. Grain handling facilities
  5. Asbestos
  6. Lockout/tagout
  7. Machine guarding
  8. Specific excavation requirements
  9. General recording criteria
10. General duty clause

David Sneed

Value of Time

Cowboy Safety considers the value of time. With today's technology there are very simple ways to measure the value. There are different types of time and the values of that time.

I remember the old story of the man coming down the road and he sees a farmer holding a pig up to an apple tree so that the pig can eat apples. "Doesn't it take a long time to feed your pigs that way?" The farmer replied "It does but what's time to a pig?" Make sure you know the nature of the time that you are measuring. And make sure you know the alternatives for the time.

Let's take a simple real-life example where the metric is money.

At the outset though keep in mind that you of not want to be one who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. There are plenty of times when comparisons should not be made.

Today I went to pay my county taxes. There are three choices:
1. Pay half by November 10 and the other half by May 10.
2. Pay all by December 31 and no 18% interest for a late first half.
3. Pay late and incur 18% interest.

I have meditated on the choices and I believe that it was a method set up about 30 years ago based on the values of different forms of money at that time. Obsolete but I have to live within what they offer.

Which to do? It is not as simple as whether or not there is enough cash on hand. Hopefully choice 3 does not apply. The options are worded to cause confusion between two different times and two different rates.

1. Option 1 means having half the money for six months longer than option 2.
2. Option 2 means having half the money for one and a half months.

The real issue is what is the value of half the money for four and a half months.

If you are paying interest on a credit card or line of credit you can pay down the principal for four and a half months at whatever interest rate. Let's say it is 12% which is 1% per month. The value would be 4.5% (1% per month for 4.5 months.) That works out to $45 per thousand dollars. Not too bad.

With a comprehensive plan for how you use money the time value of money can be well worth your while. It does take some study. Someone once added to the basic idea of business and came up with:

Buy low. Sell high. Collect early. Pay late.

When I was with Litton Industries Corporate Consulting we would go into a new acquisition and make some changes. Generally these were old line family owned businesses. They would allow customers to pay slow yet on their own purchases they would be careful to take the 1% discount for payment in 10 days. We would change to enforce 30 days from customers and wait 60 days or longer to pay suppliers. Often this created enough cash to eliminate all loans.

David Sneed

Modelling and Record-Keeping

Practitioners of Cowboy Safety need to rapidly create future models of the short term and sometimes very very short term as well as years into the future. There are a variety of well understood and reliable tools for doing that starting with simple spreadsheets.

These practitioners must also keep records of the past even when they do not understand why. It is from these records that models of the past can be made.

"If you can't model the past where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?"

This is a most succinct quote from William Happer who is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University. While admittedly not a climatologist, Professor Happer has made the most rational and believable argument why increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to be desired rather than resisted.

Thucydides, author of The History of the Peloponnesian War, wrote in great detail. He wrote in such detail that his book has been called the most boring book ever written. He wrote in detail because he said he did not know what might be needed by future historians.

It is by modeling the past that we can model the future and thus avert the injuries and sometimes disastrous effects of hazards.

David Sneed

OSHA Top Citations for FY 2011

The following is the list of most frequent citations by OSHA in the 12 months ended 9/30/11. The problem with compliance focused safety is that extra attention is given to items that are most visible. The total number of violations is quite small related to number of workplaces having these violation possibilities. Cowboy Safety is a holistic approach that views that specific workplace conditions are the most important issues.

  1. 7,139 violations - Fall Protection
  2. 7,069 violations - Scaffolding
  3. 6,538 violations - Hazard Communication
  4. 3,944 violations - Respiratory protection
  5. 3,639 violations - Lockout/tagout
  6. 3,584 violations - Electrical wiring methods
  7. 3,432 violations - Forklifts
  8. 3,244 violations - Ladders
  9. 2,863 violations - Electrical - general requirements
10. 2,728 violations - Machine guarding

David Sneed

Q Prime

Q Prime is a music management company that has been in operation for 30 years.

They started with no outside funding.

Rather than get cell phones they hired an assistant.

Their business model is simple:

• Keep operating costs low. "I worked out of my house for six years with a telex machine in my basement next to the washing machine."
• Diversify your revenue base
• Use your network. "But if people had thought all along that we sucked, no level of personal contact would have helped that."
• Ask colleagues to recommend recruits

The two founders, Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, are practitioners of what is known as creative friction yet are close enough that they work together in one room and finish each other's sentences. According to industry consultant Peter Lubin, being managed by this duo is "like having an Hasidic scholar whose partner is Attila the Hun."

There are few music entrepreneurs that last. The market is too volatile. By carefully monitoring risk in both activities and operations Q Prime has survived, the two founders are multimillionaires, and they have fun doing what they like to do. 

David Sneed

Ptolemy's Map of the World

In 150, Claudius Ptolemy a Greek, made a map of the world. He attempted, as have many others, to show the world or parts of the world in a flat format. Ptolemy's projection is still in use on maps made by such esteemed organizations as the American Central Intelligence Agency. The most common map that we all know is one that really does not do that good a job. 

Called the Mercator projection it distorts land masses as the poles are approached. Greenland becomes quite large on a Mercator map. 

Maps have historically served other purposes than to express geography. Religion has been frequently used. We've all seen the maps used for advertising in a given town or city. There are subway maps that are indispensable for movement. 

Safety plans are a type of map and they often depend on specialized geographical maps. In a formal Cowboy Safety program we make a variety of customized maps maps to achieve program goals. 

In my office I have a spherical map that has the North Pole in the lower center. Kugaaruk (formerly Pelly Bay,) Nunavut, Canada is the is the center of the map. Barrow Alaska is in the lower right. This is a map that depicts the market area of the barges that traverse the Northern part of the earth. 

David Sneed

A Genesis 21 Coincidence

Last night, my daughter Hannah and her family were over. I had my Bible out and was going to share with my son-in-law Matt some things out of Genesis 21. Cheri and I had read that chapter on Friday morning. Coincidence! Matt and Hannah had just the day before been listening to that chapter on tape.

Genesis 21 is a great chapter.

God's promise to Abraham had come true. Abraham, age 100, and Sarah his wife, age 90, became parents.

Two things we should note.

First the timing was set by God.

Second, the impossible happened. That is why we know it was of God.

God expects us to handle ordinary things on our own. These things are always in the realm of the possible. But God does not expect us to always dwell in the realm of the possible. That is why he gives us vision.

Abraham had disappointed God. Abraham had his thoughts that were very different from God's. Abraham had taken action on his own. In the second half of Genesis 21 we find that Abraham is trying to deal with the results of not trusting God to do what He had said He would do.

George Washington Carver was a poor black man, the son of slaves. Carver took God's promise in Jeremiah 33:3. The rest is history. With God's help Carver discovered many things about peanuts and their uses that modern science had not been able to do.

Oh that we would seek God's will and that we would wait on God's timing.

David Sneed

Hospital Safety Violations

The Los Angeles Times on October 29, 2011 reported that Harbor-UCLA Medical Center has been cited for safety violations. And it is not the first time.

• The hospital failed to keep its operating rooms clean. 

• Operating rooms were kept at the wrong humidity level. 

• Hospital staff were not washing their hands according to policy. 

"The hospital failed to maintain a sanitary environment for the provision of surgical services." the reports said. "This could lead to contaminated surfaces in the operating room and the spread of infection."

There may be good defenses on the part of the hospital. It is an old building and there are challenges. There is no excuse for hospital staff not washing their hands.

Key safety issues can be identified in any environment and solutions can be found within the budget.

Safety problems are often the result of forgetting hazards in the day to day operations.

David Sneed