This is a simple thought from the National Safety Council.

When you are texting, or changing the radio station, or a million other things you may as well be blind.

You are traveling 60 MPH. A vehicle a football field away is traveling 60 MPH. You are 1 1/2 seconds away from a possible head-on crash.

David Sneed

So much for turning the other cheek in Bethlehem this Christmas. The rules of human hierarchies seem to be prevalent in the church today.

The Real Cause of the Christmas Day Tragedy in Stamford

The fire that took the lives of five people in Stamford Connecticut early on Christmas Day is most troubling. See the video below. My sympathies go out to the lady who lost her children and her parents. I have had sleepless nights this week about that tragedy and more that will come in most any city and state on a regular basis.



With all events like this there is the need to understand what went wrong in the interest of prevention of future occurrences. There is going to be plenty of blame passed around. My guess is that this event will not go away soon. Even the question of why the Building Department acted so quickly to have the house demolished is going to be asked. The fire Department had said that it would be several days before the Fire Marshall could investigate. Yet at 8:00AM on Dec 26, 24 hours later, the house was torn down.

I may be the only one to bring up one issue. This is not intended to blame one of the victims but it is to blame a cultural issue that is a huge undocumented problem.

The grandfather had retired as Safety and Security Director of Brown Foreman, the liquor manufacturer. According to the press and people who knew him his entire career had been devoted to safety. He certainly knew about fire prevention, smoke alarms, friendly fire becoming unfriendly fire, and escape plans. At the present time it is believed that there were no active smoke detectors in the house. We do know that all of the family members were awake and mobile. Is it possible that this man had given no thought to the possibility of fire in the large 100 year old house with construction work underway? Is it possible that he had never, in his daughter's 47 year life, never instructed her in safety? Unfortunately the answer is probably yes to both questions. I have seen many people who understand safety on the job who are somehow unable to view application of their knowledge off the job. Somehow or another we can learn to be safe in our area of the workplace and forget it all as soon as we punch out and leave. It's as if safety is a piece of a job yet is not a piece of life. Unfortunately in many work places, safety is viewed as a necessary evil for legal compliance.

A number of years back, a man well-known for both his scientific and business knowledge engaged me to put together some defensive driving for his company staff. Right there in his office he asked me if I would be dealing with single-vehicle rollovers and seat belts. I assured him that we gave plenty of emphasis to those issues. A few months later, that man died in a single vehicle rollover while on vacation with his daughter driving. He was not wearing a seat belt. When the vehicle rolled he was ejected from the vehicle.

One of the things we aim to do in Cowboy Safety is to make safety become a part of one's personal culture. We have some unique solutions that have been heavily criticized by proponents of company safety culture. Many of these folks are believers in off the job safety but view that as a separate issue. It is not a separate issue.

When we make safety an internal value rather than a logical site specific process we can actually eliminate much of the expense we incur for safety.

David Sneed

Where to Invest in 2012?

There is the story that in 1929 before the crash that a certain Wall St banker, while getting his shoes shined, overheard two shoeshine boys talking about their stocks. This man went and sold every stock he had. He figured that when the shoeshine boys were buying and selling stocks it was time to get out.

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal carried an article about the sudden popularity of North Korean bonds that defaulted 30 years ago. People are buying the bonds with anticipation that a new day is coming in North Korea with the death of Kim Jong Il. I have to think about that.

Do the people buying those defaulted bonds know something the rest of us don't know. Are those bonds preferable to common stocks, corporate bonds, Treasury bills and real estate?

I have been a bear on 401Ks and 403Bs since they started. I knew it would be constant new money pouring into mutual funds dealing in ordinary investments. The same shares of stock would be bought and sold at ever higher prices until the day that more people wanted to sell than to buy. With baby boomers retiring and with no growth and low interest 71 million people will be cashing out.Who will buy their stocks?

I think of the words of Psalms 20 that some trust in chariots and some in horses. This little ditty tells it with graphics.

David Sneed

New Safety Jobs

The Wall Street Journal had an article on Dec 24 called "How To Ace the Google interview."

"Imagine a man named Jim. He's applying for a job at Google. Jim knows that the odds are stacked against him. Google receives a million job applications a year. It's estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 high-school students applying to Harvard gets accepted. The first and only question he got was the following. Since he had no answer the interview was ended. 

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?"

The story points out that even mainstream companies are now using these type interviews. There is a whole new world out there. Many will not survive.

What is most impressive to me is that everything is reversed from what we have known. What was once trade secrets is on the company website. What used to be sold is free. And marketing that once meant creating ads to get people interested in products now means creating products to get interest in the ads.

Safety and security, rather than poverty, is the major problem of the 21st century. And safety and security with a broadly expanded definition to meet the needs of post industrial society. Safety is becoming a part of every product and service. Safety is no longer a process. New ways of thinking are needed to retrofit safety and security to existing products and services and to embed safety and security into new products and services.

The google interview questions may not be so unusual after all.

David Sneed

Catvertising

Near the end of the year is a good time to be open to new ideas. The new year is coming. New ideas of all kinds can help flush out some of the accumulated junk from the prior year.

I won't make any comments but will just make available to you a video from an ad agency, John St, in Toronto.

I think I will use this video in some creative thinking sessions in 2012.

David Sneed

Safety is the 21st Century Poverty

In 1963, James MacGregor Burns wrote: "Because it has failed to engage itself with the problems that dog us during our working days and haunt our dreams at night, politics has not engaged the best of us, or at least the best in us. If people seem complacent or inert, the cause may lie less in them than in a political system that evades and confuses the real issues rather than sharpening or resolving them."

We find that oil companies are required to have safety plans for offshore drilling. When there was a drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we found that the plan writing was outsourced, no one read it at the oil company, and no one read it at the Minerals Management Service (MMS.) With other disasters we find that newspaper reporters within an hour have determined the cause of the incident. A year or two later OSHA or MSHA confirms that initial report and blames management for failing to prevent the incident. Money changes hands between the business and government and life goes on with no one making any real complaint.

The solutions to so many safety problems are easy but are not done. There is too much money and too many jobs involved in maintaining dysfunction and in responding to incidents.

Hunger is easy to understand. In today's society hunger is mostly a non-issue. Anyone can get food stamps and there are plenty of give-aways. Try offering a meal to a "will work for food" standing at most intersections.

The big issues today involve safety and security. Physiological needs are mostly solved. However, the solutions go beyond simply providing food to the hungry. Often the problems are qualitative and the solutions are complex.

In December of 2011, the compromise solution for the "Jobs Bill," ostensibly to create jobs, was a two month reduction of billions of dollars in contributions to a bankrupt social security fund in exchange for ten years of added fees to new mortgages.

In a campaign time for both parties, the appearance of more take-home pay is more important than grown-up solutions to real problems.

Cowboy Safety is the realization that government is not going to solve safety and security problems and that people, individually, in their own business, and in their own communities need to find a solution.

David Sneed

There is a common belief that compliant fire extinguishers and training in usage can substitute for fire prevention or the fire department. In a controlled environment try using a small fire extinguisher to put out a fire. It might work sometimes if you are present just when the fire starts.

Watch this one video of what can happen in just one minute. This fire starts with a Christmas tree. It could be with a candle, with a spark from welding, a battery charger, or a coffee maker.

The only real solution is in fire prevention. What is required is knowing the ways that a fire can start in a given location. Then have a fanatical attitude about controlling those circumstances.

David Sneed

Singing for Safety

Here is an example of a customized Cowboy Safety type application as done by TSA. This is right brain thinking applied to safety.

There is a job to be done to maintain airport security. The job is full of rules, procedures, expense and plenty of aggravation. Human reaction and attitude cannot be ordered or legislated. This chorus puts a human face to airport security. Attitudes are changed about TSA and the attitudes of TSA people are changed. The result is immediate and measurable economic benefit. The job is done quicker, more efficiently and more effectively.

A Cowboy Safety program does two things. First it takes your safety program and improves its legibility and its readability in an exciting graphic way. Then it adds the extra touch of right brain thinking. Your employees will be doing new things to become safe and to also become more productive. They may not form a chorus. On the other hand maybe they will.

David Sneed

Who Can Decide How to Reinvent?

My city is asking the question of whether or not to change from having a Mayor to having a City Manager. There is an acknowledgement of a problem. Unfortunately the decision will be up to the City Council. The result will be no change and no improvement.  

The republican (little r)  form of government in the United States is far better than what most countries have. A big problem though is that a body of elected officials is a bureaucracy. The first goal of any bureaucracy is to protect and perpetuate itself. Often it is blind to its shortcomings. Mistakes are ignored for the sake of the bureaucracy. 

The following is a letter to the editor that I wrote. Within the realm of Cowboy Safety the point is that there are alternatives that can do much better job. None of my alternatives will even be considered. Why? Because consideration would be an admission that the present system has flaws. Mayor or City Manager? It makes no difference because both are under the control of the City Council. 

Mayor or City Manager? How about none of the above? 

What could a City Manager do about “The Hole”  and snow removal downtown that a Mayor can’t do?

The potential lack of administrative skills of an elected mayor is true of other elected officials. This past week we saw testimony by Jon Corzine, ex-governor and ex-U.S. Senator, that as CEO of MF Global he has no idea what happened to $1.2 billion. He claimed ignorance of accounting. 

A new type of thinking is needed that is not learned in an MBA program or with experience in another city with the same problems. 

A new type of thinking is needed because the percentage of government revenue going to pensions is increasing. The WTE on December 11 told of a California teacher that retired last July at age 59 with a pension of $174,308. Millions of retirees will live to be 100. What plan is in effect for retirees collecting pensions for 40 years?

A new type of thinking is needed because Cheyenne, with 554 employees, has one employee per 100 citizens. The budget of $111 million is expense of more than $2,000 for each man, woman, and child. 

Four ideas:

1. Sell the City corporation to a private business. 

2. Merge county and city.

3. Adopt the Town Meeting form of government that has worked in New England for over 250 years. No city council or mayor. Rather than “government does everything” the citizens often choose to do things by themselves, with neighborhood groups, or with outsourcing. The citizens can change anything at any time. 

4. Create a volunteer group of citizens to look at these and other alternatives to be on a ballot.

David Sneed

Real World Pie Charts

The pie charts in the link below certainly make one think.

http://www.maniacworld.com/pie-charts-that-make-you-think.html

Much of what we do can consume resources and increase chances of something going wrong yet make no contribution to the goal of the activities.

When we see a significant decline in traffic deaths we find that the reason for the decline is that gasoline prices have gone up and people have cut back on driving. It had nothing to do with better roads, cars, laws, or driver training. Often those things increase crashes. Turn a dirt road into an interstate and the road becomes a race track. The vehicles off the road in icy weather are the four wheel drives. The two wheel vehicles drivers have to slow down.

In a full analysis of resources in and out of a system, be it community, firm, or family, we can find hazards and losses due to unnecessary activities that produce no benefit.

No Banker Left Behind

One of the biggest hazards for small business has been whether or not credit is available and on what terms. Bankers have been in control. Today the customer is in control because there are so many new ways for a business to be financed. Businesses using the Cowboy Safety model can get bank financing more easily than other businesses but do not have to take it.  The following Ry Cooder song is a great song about bankers. Ry Cooder is in his 6th decade of writing protest songs.

David Sneed

Law of Misguided Subsidies

T.J. Rodgers, Founder, President and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor has an article in today's Wall Street Journal called "Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels."

In the article he updates the Law of Unintended Consequences with the corollary Law of Misguided Subsidies: "Whenever Washington disrupts a market by dumping subsidies into it, Wall Street will find a way to pocket a majority of the money while the intended subsidy beneficiaries are harmed by the resulting market turmoil."

In the Cowboy Safety approach the safety model aims to allow the intended beneficiaries to get the subsidies and aims to make a path so that harm is not done. To do this requires knowledge and understanding. It also means planning well in advance often at the point of firm formation. Government also plans well in advance and may even design the subsidy program to make it difficult for the intended beneficiaries to achieve any benefit. That is because they may have another agenda or may themselves be victims of The Law of Unintended Consequences. The Cowboy Safety approach is not to take a political position, not to be critical, but to understand, to benefit and to avoid damage.

Cowboy Safety goes beyond the concepts of tax planning that is looking for deduction s and deferrals. Cowboy Safety puts the business into relevant context and synthesis. Most accountants, and I started out as one, are left brain thinkers. Left brain thinkers can analyze but they cannot synthesize. Left brain thinking worked well with industrial age businesses that transformed low level materials into higher level materials. Each step added value. Left brained thinking cannot handle any other business concept. It cannot handle the dimensions of experiential and transformational business that is borderless not just geographically but borderless in concept and in time. Neither can government.

David Sneed

Discussions

I think that if I had to pick one thing that is most troubling to me it would be those who either will not or cannot be open to a discussion of something where the subject is in some form connected to them. Even just general discussions. Regretfully that includes many Christians. And more regretfully pastors often fall into the statement in the next paragraph.

Upton Sinclair once said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary is dependent upon not understanding it." Unfortunately this covers most people in authority at any level. And that includes people who make decisions affecting others.

Outside of where there is a money impact there are so many who take simple discussions, discussions that are not in any way critical, as personal attacks.

I thank God that I am open to a discussion of anything that pertains to me. I suppose a complaint that I have is that I do not get enough criticism. Throughout my career I have always told my clients never to bother me with what is good. Only call me when something is wrong so I can fix it.

Christians are not called to make monuments of past "goods" and to explain past "bads" but to make solutions for the problems we find each day. We are to fix circumstances and heal the wounded. Our God is a God of the second chance. We should do no less. Do more good than was done in the past. And move on from the bad.

End of comments.

David Sneed