“System Accidents: Why Americans Are Injured At Work And What Can Be Done About It” will prepare you for the challenges of managing safety in the new business model. It takes you through the traditional command-and-control practices that dominate safety to this day and leads you to a new innovated approach to managing safety. The book synthesizes the theory of continual improvement with safety management. You will learn how Profound Knowledge applies to safety and will change your viewpoint about why accidents happen and how they can be prevented. The book isn’t about how to do it but why and what you need to do to take safety to the next level in your organization. How you do it will depend on you but the book will give you some very thought provoking ideas to get started.
Thomas A. Smith was born in 1948 in Detroit, MI. He worked in the Insurance Business for 17 years which he described a 200 years of business uninhampered by progress, before he started his own management consulting business. He specializes in helping managers and hourly workers apply the theory and methods of continual improvement to quality and safety.
He has written numerous articles on a new theory of safety management. He challenges the traditional approach to safety and calls for a unique way of managing that focuses on studying and fixing work systems. Borrowing from the ideas of Dr. Deming he stresses the point that accidents are a direct result of faults built into the system, not the individuals who work in the system.
His book, System Accidents, provides the story of how tradtional safety was developed and impacts us today. Mr. Smith puts forth a new theory to manage safety. He wants people work to improve the system and achieve control and excellence through the freedom to use their individual creativity and ingenuity instead of hierarchy and bureaucracy.
