Cowboy Safety

Resource Partner - Matt Fields

Matt Fields is a most unique Information Technology (IT) expert. He is laid back and people-oriented. He thinks that too much money is spent on hardware and software and he knows ways to get the job done with less cost. As Matt says, “There are high price and low price switches that do the same job. And the lower priced ones have better warranties.” In the applications arena, Matt has developed a way to produce customized in-house videos that can be run without a computer for as much as 90% less than comparable ways. They can be produced in either English or Spanish. He is working on some similar approaches with other technology applications.

Matt believes that IT is an essential tool of safety. “And it is destined to become more so as safety becomes more data-driven especially in the patient safety field.” Matt also says that data management is a safety and security issue. “It is an intangible asset and is a part of intellectual property.”

He did the initial set-up of the network for Cowboy Safety and the Medicine Bow Safety Institute. He will be moving the IT program through a period of planned growth that will include a number of network computing projects.

Matt put in many volunteer hours for the Wyoming-Montana Safety Council setting up a state of the art network. Included is a database with the ability to maintain training records in a way that is accessible by authorized outside sources via the internet. He produced several low cost customized videos on DVD. He has participated in the annual conferences keeping the IT equipment working.

He is a Network Administrator for a large imaging firm in Cheyenne. Matt also operates his own IT service and has well known long-term clients where he is their only IT source. Matt helped the Medicine Bow Safety Institute get its IT network off the ground and handles its network needs.

He began work in the IT field when he was a home-schooled student. He took computers apart and learned from the inside out how they worked. He feels that this inside out approach works just as well with safety. Matt was with Powder River Energy in Sundance Wyoming. That job formed the cornerstone for Matt's knowledge because he was the sole IT person for the company in that entire area of the state. He also did IT for the Frontier School of the Bible in La Grange Wyoming where he met the girl who became his wife and life partner.

Resource Partner - Joshua Sneed

Joshua Sneed is one of the new type of safety professionals who approach safety from the bottom up.

There is a view that says make the world better and then people will be better. He approaches it from the standpoint of make people better and then the world will be better.  This approach was introduced at the First Safety Congress in Milwaukee. The keynote speaker described safety as being “Applied Christianity.” The original idea was to take the new science of safety engineering and link it to practical human interaction.

Joshua graduated from the Essex Agricultural and Horticultural Institute, served honorably in the United States Marine Corps and then went on a full scholarship to Crestmont College in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

He is an ordained minister, holds a number of endorsements in Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) and is trained and experienced in Emergency Disaster Services.

He was deployed  to the World Trade Center Ground Zero site immediately after 9/11. He was sent to aid in the Hurricane Katrina emergency. He was among those who worked 24/7 during the 2007 Wildfires in Southern California.

He is a trainer in formal programs dealing with protecting the vulnerabilities of children, elders and the developmentally disabled.

He develops customized programs in a variety of subjects. The innovation workshop that he did for the Wyoming Montana Safety Council Conference 2008 is one of those programs.

Joshua specializes in organizational innovation and is empowered to do whatever he feels needs to be done to achieve certain specific goals within an assignment. His present main project is outreach and member development with the Salvation Army Kroc Center in San Diego.

He uses digital age tools to help redefine industrial age principles, with a vision to facilitate enhanced intergenerational communication and preserve wisdom for future safety professionals.

Resource Partner - Jim Satterfield

Jim Satterfield believes that safety begins with an employee coming to work in good shape. They may seem ok but could be chemically impaired. Since invasive drug testing is expensive and takes time Jim promotes a way to easily tell what might be going on. His program is called Rapid Eye Check. It is easy to learn and can be used by anyone. Jim hails from Houston Texas but travels extensively. The program runs all over the United States and in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Holland, and Mexico.

Jim has a diverse background in the oil industry and in a variety of retail networks with car washes, motels, night clubs, restaurants, and dinner theatre. He was an officer in the U.S. Navy.

He graduated from the University of Arkansas with a B.S.B.A and then did his graduate study at Law School.

When a family member became involved in drugs he decided to fight the problem. He acquired the rights to Rapid Eye Check from Campus Crusade for Christ and has expanded it with a licensing program.

In the niche of drug detection he can show a cost reduction of 80%.

Currently he is expanding in the arena of safety cost reduction in other aspects of safety.

“In down business cycles safety gets shorted,” says Jim. Good professionals do not have the funding to carry out their mission. By using efficient programs like Rapid Eye Check and a variety of others like Cowboy Safety, and with a networking approach involving the local community, business can get more done with reduced cost.”

Resource Partner - Deborah Sneed

Debby Sneed is a senior at the University of Wyoming majoring in English and History, and is an honors student.

She has researched the effects of standardized testing on the curricula set forth by teachers and administrators in Wyoming public schools, with the belief that a change in the learning of students cannot occur without a change in teaching techniques. Cowboy Safety is intent on making that change in the workforce on the job, off the job, and in the years before entering the workforce.

During the summer of 2008, she was an archaeologist with the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. She assisted in the excavation of the ancient Athenian Agora, and had the duties of working with a pick, trowel, shovel, and wheelbarrow; cleaning and investigating stratigraphy; delicately cleaning artifacts in the ground; sifting excavated earth and using techniques of flotation; washing and the basic techniques of conserving pottery and other objects; and doing clerical work involved in the keeping of excavation records. Additionally, she was working on understanding and describing the subjectivity of the Classical Archaeology, and the methodology of how to classify a find as an artifact. This methodology is one part of the Cowboy Safety process in that it holistically views the enterprise mission and functional model, and a customized definition of safety is applied to each individual environment.

She was a project manager in 2007 for the Wyoming-Montana Safety Council. She established a new facility in Kansas to provide training to new employees of firms with outsource contracts and to perform background checks. She was responsible for hiring and training new staff, and writing a functional operations manual.

At the University of Wyoming, she is the Vice-President of a peer education team within the STOP Violence Program; the founder of Cena Cinemaque, a club for the department of Modern & Classical Languages; the President of the Upstart Crows, the English department club; and a member of the College Republicans.

Ms. Sneed was a volunteer with the Wyoming-Montana Safety Council for several years, and was involved with a number of projects related to the reinvention of the Council. She has had ample opportunities to interface with various top safety professionals throughout Wyoming, the nation, and the world. Additionally, she was responsible for organizing and running the Council’s annual conference.

Resource Partner - Hannah Fields

Safety is a state of being and an attitude. The result is reduced injuries and losses.

Hannah Fields is of the Millennial Generation that is changing the world of safety from an engineering approach to a people-oriented holistic approach that involves business and community cooperation.

Hannah became interested in promoting safety when she was 15 years old and home-schooled. She later attended Frontier School of the Bible in LaGrange Wyoming.

She was a full-time volunteer with the Wyoming-Montana Safety Council for several years before becoming a staff project manager. As a volunteer she learned first-hand the many aspects of safety and has been to job sites across Wyoming and Montana with trainers learning and teaching how to incorporate safety on and off the job. She has become well-known in the safety community and is a requested instructor. During her time at the Safety Council, Hannah was a part of many new programs and recreating existing ones so they are more relevant to the rapidly changing world we live in today.

In 2002 she began Occupational training at the home and school level by using a small live alligator in classes. Jim Fowler of Wild Kingdom fame had come to the Safety Council Conference and among other things explained that we are genetically wired to fear being scratched, bitten or clawed but that we do not fear machines and vehicles. One adult attendee of a class with the alligator wrote that it was the best and most effective safety class she had ever attended.

In 2006 Hannah reinvented the new hire orientation for a chemical manufacturer in Cheyenne and has run the program for them since then. It can be done on-site or off-site. This training program takes two days to complete. Hannah was a major part of the development of a Contractor training program for Frontier Refining in Cheyenne WY and El Dorado KS. She has coordinated running short term training programs for several big turn-arounds with large numbers of attendees.

In September 2007 with the cooperation of the community and a grant from UPS and the National Safety Council, Hannah started a Safe Community project in Burns Wyoming. Burns will be the 5th designated Safe Community nationwide and will also be designated as an International Safe Community. There are 285 people in this community. There are many safety programs in place and a low incident rate. Hannah instituted a Safety Steering Committee there. Hannah hopes to make Burns an example for the rest of the world by showing what can be done in a small community limited in resources and where most activities have to occur on nights, weekends and holidays. The estimated date for completion of this designation is May 2009 and she and several others are devoting plenty of time to this project. Many people in Burns have been involved in helping Burns meet the stringent requirements. Hannah will be doing a presentation in Cali Colombia in August of 2009 at the World Convention.

In 2007 and 2008 she organized and ran the Annual conference for the Wyoming Montana Safety Council.

Resource Partner - W Edward Deming

Cowboy Safety draws from the Deming Method formulated by W Edwards Deming (1900-1993.)

W Edwards Deming lived in a small house on the grounds of the Irma Hotel in Cody Wyoming.His parents moved to Powell Wyoming where he lived in a tar paper shack and where his sister was the first child born in Powell. Deming was educated at the University of Wyoming.

His ideas for a better way were rejected in the United States and so he offered them to Japan. The rest is history. We all know how the Japanese became world leaders in anything they set out to do. All of that came about from the Deming Method.

From Deming:

"To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge—knowledge for leadership of transformation."

"The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!"

"Experience by itself teaches nothing."

Resource Partner - David Sneed

"Safety Council Executive Director is resigning" from the Wyoming-Montana Safety Council Safety Reminder May 2008

David Sneed, who led the Wyoming Montana Safety Council out of the red and through nearly eight years of steady financial growth, has decided to step down as the organization’s executive director.

“I’m a fixer, and I came in to fix the council, Sneed said in an interview. “The council is at a plateau and I feel like this is the right moment to leave.”

Sneed, 61, who notified the Board on Friday April 18, 2008 of his decision, will stay around until as late as July 15.

“Joe Kaplan, my counterpart in Los Angeles, was executive director for 66 years. He retired at age 94 and is still going with other ventures. Joe’s 66 years sure dwarfs my almost 8 years. But in this day and time even 8 years may be too long” said Sneed.

During Sneed’s tenure, the council phased out a major low-quality training product, added new ones and outsourced most of the commodity training to almost 150 smaller players scattered throughout Wyoming and Montana. “That move, which is still in progress, allows training to take place locally without the travel expense from Cheyenne” Sneed said. “It also minimizes the fixed costs of the council by not needing to have a large employee trainer staff.”

The council negotiated a new contract with the National Safety Council and became affiliated with the Association of Reciprocal Safety Councils (ARSC.) “The ARSC relationship allows us to present a standardized 4.5 hour basic safety program that was given more than 250,000 times last year nationwide” said Sneed.

The council also partners with SCORE and can provide free counseling for businesses. “A real plus here is that we have been able to help startups understand the need for safety as a mission critical value” he added. Sneed is the Wyoming District Director for SCORE.

Recently the council has been testing the Safe Communities program with a grant from UPS via the National Safety Council. “A town with a population of 242 will be the first town in Wyoming to achieve the designation” said Hannah Fields, council Safe Communities project leader. Other American cities with the designation are Anchorage AK, Omaha NE, Dallas TX and Springfield MO. “Donna Stein-Harris of the National Safety Council will be a speaker at the conference in Cody in May” said Fields. “She can tell you more about what this program can mean for your community. “

Financially during Sneed’s tenure the council has seen revenues grow at a rate of 21% per year. The council did a major office and classroom building renovation and has paid off that cost and the mortgage. As a prudent measure used by responsible non-profits there is now a cash reserve to allow the council to weather downturns. “When I came on board the council was on cash with order with all the suppliers” said Sneed. Now we take all the discounts.”

There is state of the art technology primarily done with donated professional help. “Unfortunately we do not yet have the conference registration fully automated because of some other priorities” Sneed added. “Hopefully we are forgiven that they have to print, write and fax.”

Sneed said that he was not sure what would be next for him. “2008 is the peak year of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) bandwagon” he said. “The safety world got onto it somewhat later than other industries even such as meeting planning but is fast catching up.” Sneed indicated that he has encouraged the safety council board to go that route. Sneed said that there is plenty of CSR money and that safety councils should get their share.

Sneed said “I want to be at the forefront of the future and so I am going to go beyond CSR. It is farther than the council Board wanted to go and so I need to do it another way. We will provide real value to community oriented small businesses that want to save their community and want to save money. We will be working to set actual guarantees of incident reduction on the job, off-the-job and in the community.”

Sneed pointed out that during his tenure at the safety council there was a conscious effort to avoid begging for money. “We accepted but did not even push advertising in the Safety Reminder as we felt that with such limited and diverse circulation it might not be an efficient medium. We have devoted our resources to finding ways to always be available. Safety training programs are offered daily, without advance registration, in Cheyenne and at another council location in Kansas.

Sneed then quoted some statistics and pointed out that more and more money is being spent on safety but the numbers do not show any significant improvement.

“By 2010 there will be more millennials than baby-boomers. With an understanding that the majority of our population is a new generation of people who have a different approach to life, that the industrial economy with its command and control philosophy is gone and that there is global competition we can see the need for a new safety paradigm.”

“ More and more businesses are receptive to moving from a compliance focus to best practices. ” He went on to describe a variety of provable results programs that he will be implementing. “By taking advantage of open source knowledge sharing, virtual community concepts and social networking, with process and product innovation, and by understanding the new ways of learning, then incidents will decrease and safety costs will drop dramatically. With improved distribution efficiency we will also be able to reach a large number of entities not currently reachable.”

Sneed pointed out that he will mobilize collaborative resources in a variety of disciplines all around the world and will be able to quickly provide customized solutions. “Product in a Day (PIAD) and organized tacit knowledge will be two of our competitive advantages” he added.

Sneed has a vast background in a number of industries where he has always been involved in innovation. He left the large company world in 1976 and has transferred and adapted best practices to small business since then. As a new twist now he expects to transfer lessons learned in small business about safety to large business.

When asked for any more comments Sneed said “The council is the smallest turn-around I have done and took the longest. But it has been the most fun.”

He can be reached at 307-433-0557, dsneed@lcrossranch.com or by mail at L Cross Ranch School, PO Box 126, Burns WY 82053.