Don't forget safety
It is not only the cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is a quality of character occasionally displayed by the upper echelons of management in port, transport and energy organisations. We can take as our example the recent strictures applied to the leadership of BP.
BP's chief executive, the outgoing Lord Browne of Madingley, roundly admired for what he has achieved at the company, leaves with a stain on his career. He said to the investigators "no manager has ever turned down a request for spending that was identified as necessary for safety".
So it may well be, but already there are reports in the papers about the saving of the cost of a safety flare (a massive $150,000) which instead was "banked" by BP's financial managers in 2002. You would have thought that our era of risk management and health and safety would have made this kind of thing very unlikely in modern times.
But you would be wrong,since modern commerce in all its consolidated glory and size tends to enthrone very talented and dynamic cost controllers in its upper echelons, men with backgrounds in finance, who do not have the peculiar engagement of the doers and operations people. How does it come about that the safety of operations lags behind the best practice? It starts when the safety and quality management jobs are staffed by middle-ranked managers who are treated with courtesy and condescension by senior managers whenever they are invited to the top table.
Although the parties will be present in shirts, ties and suits, the safety man might as well be wearing a brown warehouseman's coat. There will be a certain amount of second guessing of operations going on. They can't help it, this is what accountants and financial people do day-in and day-out. Yet few people who have seen them can forget the scathing remarks scribbled on the margins of the Master's recommendation to install a safety indicator light on the bridge of the "Herald of Free Enterprise", which was declined on cost grounds.
It is all a question of values and leadership. You read the slogan everywhere:"Safety is our Number One Priority". Yet the evidence of your eyes very soon will tell you whether this is so.You need not be terribly technically talented to spot the problem companies.You will be able to read it in the "Tough Guy" ethos in companies.
Or the sordid conditions around which people work. I can recall one impressive cargo fire which was not unconnected with the fact that stevedores were able to wash using the facilities of an oil drum filled with water heated by a bare kettle element. Or the lack of respect and seniority of people at the operations end of the business who really know what they are doing and the risks they are running.
Companies that get this side wrong often have safety problems and large incidents are often the result of many small inconsequential lapses.Is the odd ghastly event in our industry the price of admiralty or really something which follows from the way we treat people and earn money?
