Err on the Side of Safety

Two days ago I was on the treadmill watching CNN when sudddely the president's speech in New Orleans was interrupted by a silver flying saucer over Colorado. I couldn't hear the volume and couldn't understand why they kept mentioning a boy in the caption below the images.

It turns out they thought the six-year-old boy was in the helium saucer-like balllon that had risen to 7,000 feet. For the next 90 minutes I was mesmerized by this wild event and thought often of my own eight-year-old son, Ben. When the balloon finally landed and the workers opened it up, I feared that the boy had fallen out in route. Only much later did millions of people learn that the boy was hiding in the attic.

Whether this event was a hoax or not, and as of this writing we're really not certain, is not the point. From the perspective of delivering a great management performance, the media and rescue crews all did their jobs exactly the right way.

Always err on the side of safety. Even if the circumstances seem bizarre and outlandish, stay with the pursuit of safety until you've learned that what you thought was true is not true. Great managers always consider that the unlikely is possible and put the safety of other people ahead of their financial concerns.

It cost an incredible amount of money for all those people to try to "save" that little six-year-old boy. Obviously people worked frantically to do everything they could to increase the chances that the boy would live. That is the appropriate response if you want to be a great manager. Go all out in the pursuit of safety, not in the pursuit of short-terms savings or profits.