The Holiday Season

It’s the holiday season; the most wonderful time of the year. The perfect occasion to celebrate, doing all the things you like the best – you know exactly what they are – with all the people who are the best – family and friends. Unless you’re in retail or graduated with honors from the Ebeneezer Scrooge School of Business, that’s exactly what you should be doing.

It’s what holidays are for. 

As for work, over the holidays business tends to take a back seat to all the things and people that matter more. Obviously. That does beg a question, though: why isn’t it that way all year long?

That it is gets us in trouble. Not that there’s a thing wrong with taking care of business: it is what makes the world go round, and, thankfully, keeps people like you and me gainfully employed. But putting the business ahead of what matters most – family, friends, faith, health – has come at a high cost to many of your peers, past and present. 

It took a visit from three spirits to convince Mr. Scrooge of something I’m sure you already know. 

As a practical matter, your challenge is remembering what you know perfectly well in the heat of the battle. That’s when the demands of business – production, cost, quality, schedule, customer – collide with doing those things safely. No, it doesn’t have to be that way, and in the long term it really isn’t that way. Safety isn’t just good for the people doing the work of the business; it’s also good for the business. 

Keeping up that holiday spirit all year long might help you maintain that perspective. For more than two decades, it’s what we’ve been calling the Case for Safety: why managing safety is always the most important duty of every leader.

Something to remind yourself of while you’re sipping a cup of holiday cheer.

Our Silver Anniversary

For us, these holidays we have something else worth celebrating: our twenty-fifth year in the business. In December 2000, I boarded a plane in Houston and headed north on an engagement with my first client, operating in the oil sands of northern Alberta. A quarter-century later finds me still at it, writing this edition of the NEWS sitting in a Starbucks in eastern Tennessee after a day spent teaching safety leadership practices to several dozen of your industrial peers. 

Filling the years in between have been clients and locations numbering in the hundreds, days spent with tens of thousands of your peers the world over, countless hours writing about managing safety performance, and serving on a team, the fabulous colleagues who make up our practice.

It’s been an experience nothing short of amazing. 

As someone who is counted among so many good clients, colleagues, readers and friends, I’d like to say thank you for the pleasure of your company, and the privilege of your time and interest. 

Good NEWS

No sooner had we opened for business in 2000 than I began writing. The first marketing communication I authored in 2001 described in detail the safety leadership responsibilities delegated to the front-line leader. It was an impressive list of the practical things that play large in sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. When I read the note recently, I found those duties virtually unchanged; I doubt that comes as any great surprise, but it does make a useful point.

It wasn’t long before we started publishing what you know as The NEWS. 

Since our consulting practice is focused where safety, execution, and leadership intersect, it naturally follows that the subjects found in The NEWS would fall into that same, very narrow niche. You won’t find a single word written on the need for new programs, the benefit of redesigning processes, or selling the next big thing promising to improve safety performance.  We’re simply all about safety execution.

That being the case, when I first started writing The NEWS, I worried that I’d quickly run out of topics to write about and interesting things to say on the subject. Now I realize I’ll run out of time first. There’s a long list of tough safety challenges for leaders to deal with, and, sadly, a never-ending supply of real-life cases to prove that’s so.

We’ve now published more than two hundred editions of The NEWS. Our twenty-fifth anniversary seems the perfect occasion to republish some of the better editions in the form of a book.

Hence its title, Good NEWS. 

Good NEWS is being released this week and will be available on Amazon and all the other places you find books on the internet.

Sixteen years ago, my first book was published by Wiley, Alive and Well At The End Of The Day. It’s a textbook describing management science as it applies to leading and managing safety performance. Alive and Well defines and details the processes and practices that constitute effective safety leadership and management demonstrated by those best at the practice of safety leadership.

Safety management and leadership are too often treated as art: someone’s opinion as to what’s proper, fashionable – even trendy. That explains why art has always been in a constant state of change: out with the old, in with the new. By comparison, science is based on the time-honored principles of observation and analysis; evidence and proof. That process follows the Scientific Method: hypothesis, experiment, analysis and conclusion, or as Deming, ever the scientist, described it, “Plan, do, check and adjust.” 

Alternatively, science can begin with observation: determine facts, then follow with analysis and comparison to establish a principle, something Sir Isaac Newton excelled at. For twenty-five years, observation, analysis and comparison has been our process to define and test by practice the management practices and principles defining what successful leaders do to lead and manage safety.

While Good NEWS covers much of the same territory as does Alive and Well, it does so in an entirely different way, and for a fundamentally different purpose. Good NEWS functions the way you would expect a consultant to – observe, analyze, conclude, and, in some cases, suggest, – but in fifteen hundred words. That’s a five-minute read. As I have pointed out in numerous editions, it’s a newsletter, not a book.

“Help leaders think – and think better” is how I would explain its approach.

While writing The NEWS is way more fun than work, creating Good NEWS required me to go back and reread every word of The NEWS: more than two hundred editions spanning more than two decades. There was a feeling of dread at the prospect of having to read three books’ worth of my words. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be like meeting up with old friends; every edition had its own character, and I couldn’t find a single thing I wished I hadn’t written.

Lucky me.

Finally, just like safety, producing The NEWS is a team game. The process begins with writing; next come the critical steps of challenging, improving, and editing. Only after they are executed is The NEWS published the way our good readers see it. That would never have happened without the collaboration of Scott Pignolet, and Simoné and David Balmert. 

My heartfelt thanks for their contribution to The NEWS.

And best wishes to you this holiday season.

Paul Balmert
December 2025