No Business Is Immune To Tragedy

Not even in Minneapolis...

While my client was hosting its annual employee recognition reception Thursday afternoon just three miles away in Minneapolis police were responding to a mass killing at Accent Signage Systems, a small company located in the pleasant Bryn Mawr neighborhood.  According to news reports the alleged killer was apparently an employee who had been terminated that day.  Three employees (including the owner) and a UPS driver were killed, four more were wounded (three critically), and the shooter (a terminated employee) took his own life.  Gratefully this sort of thing doesn't happen often, but no business is immune to such tragedy.  We will learn more about precisely what happened, what was done to prevent it, and what else might have been tried.  In the mean time care for yourselves, each other, and your family members; support your fellow employees; insist on a bully-free workplace and humane management; and report any threatening comments or other behaviors that concern you.  We can all work together to create a safe and secure workplace for ourselves, our teams, and our community.

Photo credit: bjmacke via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/bjmacke/2644522865/

Good News From The BLS CFOI

Workplace homicide continues to decline...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has published its preliminary Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) numbers for 2011. Good news; last year the workplace was slightly less lethal overall.  There were 4690 fatal injuries at work in 2010 and 4609 in 2011.  Violent deaths at work declined from 832 to 780.

The BLS has changed its coding for 2011; “Assaults and violent acts” is now “Violence and other injuries by persons or animals.”

• Violence and other injuries by persons or animals – 780
• Homicides – 458
• Suicide – 242
• Animal and insect related – 37

There is another new category in the preliminary data this year. “Injury by person – unintentional or intent unknown,” currently accounts for 43 deaths.  Of those 17 deaths were the result of unintentional shootings, presumably negligent discharges.

Of perennial interest to me and my peers in the security trade, workplace homicides continue to decline; 458 murders is the lowest in the series started in 1992.  There were also fewer suicides this year than last – down from 270 to 242, reversing a troubling upward trend over the past couple years.

"Animal and insect related" deaths are divided between stings and venomous bites and being gored, kicked, or trampled by cattle and horses.  Ouch.

These numbers are subject to revision - and usually increase - before the final statistics are published in a few months.

A question to be resolved is whether these lower numbers are driven by our current Great Recession or by effective crime prevention and incident management efforts.  One would hope to demonstrate it's the latter while we fear we are enjoying only a temporary respite brought on by the former.  Only time will tell.

Literary Oversight Corrected

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game has aged well...

I read Orson Scott Card's original short story in Analog when it was first published in 1977 and it has stuck with me all these years.  Why I have not read his fine novel until now baffles me; just another example of a misspent adulthood I guess.  In any case I'm glad - very glad - to have corrected my oversight.  Ender's Game is excellent science fiction and a strong piece of storytelling.  It has so much to say about the nature of leadership that anyone with personal or professional responsibility for others who has not read it should.  There is no reason to wait like I did.  Try to get around to reading it before half a lifetime passes you by.

What's in a Word?

Principles of Neurotheology overreaches...

Over the past few years I've deeply enjoyed several of the books written by Andrew Newberg, especially those penned with his late collaborator Eugene d'Aquili.  Newberg's latest, Principles of Neurotheology, which he describes as a "principia" for this nascent field which he has done much to advance, left me cold for most of its 266 pages (it felt like many more before I checked).  Newberg casts such a broad net that neurotheology might become all things to all its proponents. A cynic might wonder if the field he is mapping isn't the perfect vehicle with which to scoop up Templeton Foundation grants. A more charitable soul might surmise that Newberg either become (or admitted to himself that he is) a deeply religious person and is bending over backwards to leave his spiritual impulse some wiggle room.  Things did pick up a bit in chapters 8-10, when it felt like Newberg was returning to his roots as a scientific researcher, but throughout Principles of Neurotheology he rarely describes any aspect of the field that wouldn't be better addressed by neurology or theology/philosophy alone.  Predictably, some religious reviewers find his latest book too secular while some skeptics find it too religious.  Offending both extremes sometimes means you are hewing a middle path, but science is about truth not balance.   If you have not read on this topic, or on Newberg and d'Aquili's contributions to the field, I strongly recommend you start with The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience or Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

Samsara, Take Two

For those who insist, here are some details...

Samsara is the ancient Pali or Sanskrit word applied to the Vedic concept of perpetual life, death, and rebirth.

Samsara, the movie, examines humanity in its many manifestations and its search for spiritual truth as we live out our lives on an ever turning wheel of existence.  Samsara is without dialogue; it tells its story with majestic images and a compelling sound track.  Many scenes of nature and the human environment are stunning.  As it is in life, not every human experience portrayed is pleasant.  Samsara features images of discord, inequity, and objectification.  While much of the movie is writ large it takes time to look deeply into the eyes of the people whose lives it captures, young, old, familiar, different, energized, tired, content, and put upon.  As they engage us from the screen are eyes expressing a question or making an accusation?

Samsara evokes memories of the ground-breaking 1982 Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (The first film in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy, which also included Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi.), the 1985 Chronos, and the 1992 film Baraka, and for good reason.  Director Ron Fricke applied his prodigious talents to all of them. 

Samsara's producer Mark Magidson worked with Fricke on Chronos and Baraka (the home video release of which was described by Roger Ebert as "sufficient reason to acquire a Blu-ray player").  In their latest collaboration they are making use of the finest cinema technologies available.  It is simply an awesome experience!

Cassie and I saw Samsara at the Edina Cinema, which converted to DLP Digital projection and sound just last month.  The experience could only be more real if you visited the 25 countries where the film was shot over the last five years.  There was a time when serious cinephiles sought out movies of this quality early in their run, before the prints began to show their age due to scratches and repaired breaks.  Now it seems films preserved in the digital format will not age.  See Samsara on the largest and very best screen you can find.  

Just go see it.

You can thank me later.