Paul O'Neill took over Alcoa and told investors the company would become the safest in America, not the most profitable. He required every major injury reported to him within 24 hours with a fix plan. The safety mandate forced workers to talk openly across all levels, sparking conversations about efficiency and operations that transformed the company.
Paul O'Neill's story is a great story. So he was brought in to be the CEO of Alcoa, and Alcoa had not been performing well. And at his first investor meeting in New York, he got up and said, there are X number of employees who get injured in the company every day. There are X number of people that get injured every day. And miss at least one day of work. And that's not okay. We need to become the safest company in the country. The investor said, okay, great, good. Glad to hear that. But what are you going to do to turn around the company? And he said, I just told you, we are going to become the safest company there is. Okay, great. But what are you going to do to turn around the company? And he kept repeating it. As the story goes, One investor left the meeting, called his office, and said, the board hired a hippie to run Alcoa. Tell everyone to sell their stock. Well, what Paul O'Neill put in place were all these mechanisms to improve safety, but most importantly, to get people talking to each other about safety. And when Whenever there was a major safety incident, it was required to be reported to him within 24 hours, and they were required to report to him what they were going to do to fix it, to avoid it in the future. That started people talking to each other. And once people started talking to each other, they started talking about other things. You know, we can improve efficiency if we did this. We could improve production if we did this, or whatever it was. And through that change in culture, using safety as the cultural change mechanism, he turned around Alcoa. Absolutely brilliant. Exactly. Totally brilliant.
