Re: OT: Dark Side of Management

From: <bbullough@foth.com>
Date: Mon Mar 26 2007 - 09:34:00 EDT

I have spent a lot of my career doing safety, environmental and industrial hygiene oriented work. I have found that most companies, plants and plant management groups officially acknowledge that "safety comes first" or other such, but they are compensated (directly or indirectly) much more for getting more widgets out the door, or higher utilization of capital than for a reduced safety or exposure rate. Also, most people (and this includes Sr level mgt in Fortune 500 companies) are not good at "multi-tasking", but have excellent focus. So what you end up with is a chain of management who all want to do what "makes sense" to further the mission - more widgets out the door. I, however, am not averse to standing toe to toe and telling an Exec. VP that he is screwing up, endangering lives, and is likely to be held personally reseponsible for injury or even death due to his unwillingness to give me the downtime to implement the improvements that he has hired me to design. I eventually win, and later the productivity is up (more widgets out the door, with a reduced incident rate). I have always maintained that a crucial part of a good engineer is his personality and willingness to stand up for what is defendably correct (leave opinions out - use data).

... Bruce D. Bullough ...
Lead Process Engineer
Foth Production Systems, LLC
8550 Hudson Boulevard North, Suite 100
Lake Elmo, MN 55042
Direct: +651-288-8598 Fax: +651-288-8551 <a href="http://www.foth.com">http://www.foth.com</a>

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Christopher Wright <chrisw@skypoint.com> Sent by: <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=FJLMd4entPgaFo-vQyRSe-suHXTmmoDz2L0kNs3v4fs0MoPK87GmudCXNoWeSb8Th74XOslC9GK8bllVCvrJ24vd750S">PipingDesign@yahoogroups.com</a> 03/24/2007 10:29 PM
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Subject
Re: [PipingDesign] OT: Dark Side of Management

On Mar 24, 2007, at 4:42 PM, Tony Paulin wrote:

> Of all the knot-headed
> personalities I've encountered in engineering, I don't remember one
> that
> would even think about sacrificing safety for profit, (unless I am
> incredibly naive - which is highly likely).
Read this. <http://onlineethics.org/essays/shuttle/telecon.html#fig10>

I think if you'd told the attendees at the pre-launch meeting that they cared more about profit than safety you'd have gotten some pretty outraged responses. But they wanted to launch so badly that they ignored previous experience and figured that it was safe to launch because there was no absolute proof that the seal would malfunction. The situation was ambiguous, to the extent that no booster had ever blown up before although there are indications that there was a lower limit to the temperature that the seal would work. The decision was made over-ruling the judgment of Boisjoly who knew what he was talking about, not because management didn't care about crew safety but because they wanted to launch so very much that they figured they could keep on getting lucky. The real dark side of management isn't ignoring safety, it's the ability to convince themselves that a firm handshake and a can-do attitude trumps Mother Nature.

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=5bGJ3DTXajX_kS6lahCxVUItOs_mI0lHAwy6belvtyaFdX1Vci8bQpGZfaNZr9p6UvnT4rN6K24pRkWuExs">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania

1864)
<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/</a> Received on Mon Mar 26 09:34:00 2007