Thursday, January 13, 2011

Blog goes public

Congratulations friends!!! our blog has become public,thanks to Madhu. Madhu is still trying to refine it so that it becomes user friendly.
So friends ! It has been a considerable time since we were exposed to the time tested tools of ACL. It has helped me in redicovering myself and refining my acquired methods of inter personal skills, and I am still learning. As an effective leader it is very simply put, is to " Give light and people will find the way". You have to continuously upgrade your knowledge and wisdom to show The Light which way. And the way is common Goal and aspiration of all participants and stakeholders. Think about it and each team member should post his ' confession'
on how he/she is improving themselves. Happy working.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

COME LET US LEARN FROM ANTS...

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. So said the Bible Proverbs 6:6-8.


Ants have plenty of lessons to share with us..


The legs of ants are very strong so they can run very quickly. If a man could run as fast, for his size, he could run like a racehorse...Robust enthusiasm


Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight... Enormous labor out put


An ant's brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million cells. So, a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.While they are a team they are much stronger...Benefits of team work


The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants... Spirit of sharing.


There are three kinds of ants in a colony: The queen, the female workers, and males. The queen and the males have wings, while the workers don’t. The queen is the only ant that can lay eggs. The male ant’s job is to mate with the future queen ants and they do not live very long afterward. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens. The job of the queen is to lay eggs which the worker ants look after. Worker ants are wingless females that are sterile. They look for food, look after the young, and defend the nest.

Ants have four distinct growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa and the adult. The worker ants keep the eggs and larvae in different groups according to ages. Day and night, the worker ants move the eggs and larvae to warmer places within the colony. .Sharing of responsibility.

Ants are clean and tidy insects. Some worker ants are given the job of taking the rubbish from the nest and putting it outside in a special rubbish dump!...Amazing house keeping.

Ant colonies also have soldier ants that protect the queen, defend the colony, gather or kill food, and attack enemy colonies in search for food and nesting space. If they defeat another ant colony, they take away eggs of the defeated ant colony. When the eggs hatch, the new ants become the "slave" ants for the colony. Some jobs of the colony include taking care of the eggs and babies, gathering food for the colony and building the anthills or mounds.


The Leaf Cutter Ants are farmers. A Tropical Leafcutter ant uses its sharp outer jaw to cut leaves and make them into pulp. The pulp is later used to make fungus gardens. These gardens are looked after and harvested for food... Caring for future.

So let us revisit these tiny creatures for some more wisdom we humans who generally feel proud how superior we are.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Few Interesting quotes

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."  -
-       Henry Ford
     Top 5 quotes from Henry Ford
  • "You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."
  • "Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success."
  • "Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
  • "A bore is a fellow who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it."
  • "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business."
Top 5 quotes from success
  • "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." 
  •  "Someone doing it often interrupts the person saying it cannot be done."
  • "Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."
  • "Success is dependent upon the glands; sweat glands."
  • "Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have."

Sunday, December 19, 2010

LIVE LIFE DIFFERENT...

Believe: where others doubt!

Work: where others refuse!

Save: where others waste.!

Stay: where others quit.!

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT!

...That is life!

Saturday, December 18, 2010

LEADERSHIP IN HSE...DO NOT NEGLECT.

I received the following editorial of NTI safety net quarter 2010 from our HSE division which of thought provoking.
This is something we need to reflect during the forthcoming new year. Let us start make resolutions.

A time for reflection – Management and Workforce.

As this editorial is written, in 2010 8 more people have died in relation to our operations and 69 members of our workforce have suffered injury at work. This is a completely unacceptable situation. How has this happened? Why is the accident rate starting to rise again?

Any accident investigation carried out properly will identify that one or more of the underlying causes trace back to how HSE is managed in the organisation by management – whether supervisors, managers or executives or any combination of them. Whenever someone is hurt, management needs to accept its part in what happened, and implement change that addresses the underlying cause to avoid a repetition.

To make sure that all levels of management carry out their safety role in a visible and felt way, Safety Leadership programs were introduced in late 2009. Over 3000 supervisors, managers and executives have now attended these workshops with NTI and others in the last 15 months – that’s nearly 6% of the entire pan-PDO workforce. On the courses, every one of the delegates declared to their colleagues the personal action they would now take as Safety Leaders – what they would stop doing, and what they would start to do, like starting to demonstrate better, safer behaviours to their workforce.

Why has the required improvement in safety leadership not happened then? Were the declarations just a set of easily spoken words? Or is there something deeper involved? Every company is focused on keeping its costs down, and implementing new safety initiatives may be seen by many in management as another cost (introduced by PDO) that produces nothing, and affects the bottom line adversely. Let’s just examine that statement and the possible mindset behind it.

In 1995, the Health & Safety Executive in the UK carried out a study on the cost of accidents at work including the oil and gas industry[1]. We can all learn something from their findings, particularly as the costs in the document need to be adjusted upwards for 15 years of inflationary factors.

During accident investigations, insurers in Oman now establish whether their insured client has fulfilled its legal responsibilities under the OSH Regulations[2]. If not, the insurers are apparently, refusing to meet the insurance claim – the losses are therefore even greater than the HSE’s findings.

Here in Oman, PDO’s oil and gas industry involves construction and transport industry operations on a large scale.

The HSE’s 18 week study found that in construction there were over 3750 near misses for every single accident. That’s 3750 opportunities to prevent an accident from happening. The study established that accidents or potential accidents over the life of the contract would have produced a loss of 8.5% of the contract value. For every OMR 1 of insured loss, there are OMR 11 uninsured losses when an accident occurs.

In transport operations, the cost of accidents represented 37% of annual profits to the company. Uninsured losses were eight times higher than insured losses. Although there have been remarkable improvements in LTIs and fatalities associated with transport operations in Oman, they do still occur, and so do these losses.

With oil and gas operations in particular, for every LTI or fatality there are 126 near misses – 126 missed opportunities to prevent the accident from happening. Again, the HSE’s study identified that for every OMR 1 uninsured loss associated with an accident, there are OMR 11 lost to uninsured losses. In 84 non-injury accidents, the losses amounted to OMR 225,000 before inflationary adjustment.

The HSE’s study findings only tell part of the story. The losses that cannot be easily quantified are probably the most significant, long-lived and far-reaching. The pain, suffering and trauma that every injured party suffers; the stress and suffering that the members of their immediate family suffer – sometimes for weeks and months afterwards; the stress and upset caused to the extended family members and work colleagues of the injured party; the loss of reputation to the company and the effect this may have on obtaining future contracts.

The recognition, reporting of, and acting upon unsafe behaviours or conditions in the workplace are opportunities we are collectively missing. If every member of management was consistently visible and felt in the workplace; always turning up in the right way; engaging the workforce on a personal level in the right way; demonstrating the right behaviours; coaching and mentoring those who do not yet know the right way of doing things; the workforce would follow the example set. ‘I can see the boss does it this way and I want to keep him happy, so that’s the way I’ll do it too”.

The HSE training changes introduced in 2009 focused on making the workforce and management aware of the safe behaviours that are required to keep the workplace safe. These need to be consistently driven by the leadership in all companies in our operations – not by PDO ‘policing’ it. The increasing LTIs and fatalities causing huge losses, many of them uninsured, is a reflection of the Safety Leadership being demonstrated by supervisors managers and executives. If accidents are rising, effective Safety Leadership is declining. We MUST do better.

The HSE’s study has shown that consistent, visible and felt Safety Leadership is a lot less costly, in every sense, than dealing with losses caused by accidents, injuries, and all of the associated activities.

What can we do in 2011 to change the rising trend in LTIs and fatalities?

· Be a consistently positive safety role model to all those you work with.

· Do things the right way, not because PDO tells you to, but because it’s the right thing to do.

· Drive yourself and every member of your management team (CEO to front line supervisor) to be a visible and felt Safety Leader – get involved and be seen to be doing it.

· Show appreciation for safe working and coach and mentor those that do not yet know how.

· Create a safety culture that blames no-one, but does hold people responsible and accountable in a fair and open way.

· Regularly assess the HSE competence of your workforce to ensure they apply at work what they learn on HSE courses.

· Encourage staff to report unsafe conditions and behaviours; act promptly to correct the issue.

· Look for opportunities to do things more safely – it’s much more cost-effective than having an accident.

· Learn from every incident and communicate the learning to your workforce.

Collectively, we can all contribute to an improving safety performance in the workplace. If every one of us simply applied what we learn on HSE courses we attend, and followed the 3 Golden Rules, without exception – Comply – Intervene – Respect, accidents would disappear from our industry.

In every case of 2010’s LTI’s, at least one of the party’s involved – manager, supervisor or worker - failed to comply or intervene.

The solution is in our own hands. A New Year is upon us. We CAN and must do better.

Ian Bowen HLD8

PDO Corporate Adviser

HSE Training & Competence



[1] HSG 96 ‘The Costs of Accidents at Work’, Health & Safety Executive, HSE Books, 1997

[2] Ministerial Decision 286, 2008 – Occupational Safety & health Regulations, Oman Labour Law.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Collective decision of General Life

Dear All,

One good example of collective decision or group decision.

Once there was a marriage function and this marriage was a example of love marraige but from the groom side it has announced that you people can take my daughter in such condition you have bring a baraat of 100 people and each one has to eat a single (full chick ) in your dinner and if any one who could not meet the target then i will not give my girl to you.

All was surprised that how a single man can eat a full chick in his dinner even though may be he has taken his lunch and other marriage snacks in between breakfast to dinner.

They decided to take the ideas of all the team members and one gentle man told their team that its very easy let you first accept the proposal.

This man informed to the father of girl that we will eat 100 nos chick but that is our method statement how we will eat.Girl father agreed and the story moves on that the collective team decision was like that let him to give one chick and all of us 100 team members will take one single chick then we can order the another one and in this process we can eat all the 100 chick within the scope and target can be achieved easily.

They do the same and achieve the target within the specification and time limit and Finally marriage has done .

There is great importance of collective team decision and we should ask to other team members to have a achievable target.

Please share your ideas and collect the ideas from others.