Quality Safety Edge would like to welcome Dr. Daniel (D.J.) Moran as their new Senior Vice President. Dr. Moran joins the QSE team with experience in behavior-based safety and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Through his experiences, New to Quality Safety Edge, Moran has developed a workshop that couples BBS with leadership and employee commitment to safety. The workshop ensures that employees strongly tie their safe behavior at work to the quality of life it brings to themselves and their families.

“Once an Eagle Scout, always an Eagle Scout,” says Dr. D.J. Moran referring to his affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America, and he might add, once a heavy metal musician, always a heavy metal musician. What? Moran, Senior Vice President, QSE, could be described as a study in contradictions, but maybe a better description would be inquisitive and versatile. Yet, Moran, when talking about his life and career, seems altogether laid back. He begins his Web site self-description with “I’d prefer my biography to reflect the most vital and meaningful things in my life, and so I really should prioritize writing my bio about my family, friends, and love for heavy metal.”

It’s not the intro one would expect from a man with a doctorate in clinical and school psychology from Hofstra University, who is also a speaker, author, and founder of the MidAmerican Psychological Institute. His specialties include applied behavioral analysis, organizational behavior management, government consulting, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), leadership consulting, behavior-based safety (BBS), innovation training, sales coaching, and executive coaching. Moran has also appeared in over a dozen television episodes of the Discovery Channel’s Hoarding: Buried Alive and Confessions: Animal Hoarding as an on-camera professional. New to Quality Safety Edge, Moran has developed a workshop that couples BBS with leadership and employee commitment to safety.  The workshop ensures that employees strongly tie their safe behavior at work to the quality of life it brings to themselves and their families. However, despite his diverse interests and accomplishments, Moran’s focus on family and the enjoyment of life is probably what keeps him so grounded. 

Born in Queens, New York, Moran (now a Chicago resident) grew up with his two brothersjust outside ofNew York City. He completed his undergraduate degree at Marquette University. But before he even attended one class, he met his future wife.“We met the first week of freshman orientation. She was about to get in the car to go home and she gave me a lollipop. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to hold onto this and show her that I saved it when we get married.’ I knew within a few moments of meeting her that she was the one,” Moran recalls.

At Marquette, Moran started out as a journalism major, but soon found his interests leaning in a different direction. “I decided I wanted to write for science journals, but journalists don’t write for science journals—scientists do,” he says. “I was more interested in the behavioral sciences.” This may have seemed another odd turn for a person who had always seen music as a key interest. “Music has always been a part of my life growing up. One of my earliest memories is trying to figure out how to put a 45 single onto a phonograph,” he says. In fact, Moran enjoyed ten years playing in a heavy metal band called Sonipath. Although he asserts that the band was only regional, evidence points otherwise. Sonipath had some radio play, toured the East Coast, was advertised on MTV, and was named best metal band/best album by the Village Voice. “It was a lot of fun and I still try to go to as many heavy metal concerts as I can. I fly around the country to meet my friends to see different heavy metal shows,” Moran explains.

So how does Moran explain how he wrote his doctorate in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and ultimately became a specialist in that field? “I got into OCD for a strange reason,” Moran relates. “I was really interested in how the words and thoughts in your head, how your cognitions make you do things. When I presented this as an idea for my dissertation, my advisor said, ‘You’re getting a degree in clinical psychology, so you have to make this clinically relevant.’ And what clinical population wrestles the most with hearing something that their mind says and then doing it? People with OCD. They have an obsession in their heads and try to do something to get rid of it. I was fascinated by OCD. It was purely scientific curiosity and it seemed the best way to go forward,” Moran relates.

In his research regarding OCD, Moran became very interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an approach that engages perhaps the latest frontier for behavioral techniques. ACT trains people how to turn thought into conscious and focused action. “ACT helps people understand that just because you have a thought or some sort of stimulation between your ears doesn’t mean you have to do it. I was interested in the application of ACT to OCD and other clinical concerns and because of that I opened up the MidAmerican Psychological Institute. We treated lots of people with intractable OCD, depression, marital concerns, and so on. I even contracted with the archdiocese of Chicago and treated the survivors of clergy abuse for a number of years,” he says.

After working in the clinical world for over a decade, Moran was approached by an organization about applying ACT to a safety issue. Everyone who attended Moran’s subsequent seminar came away very impressed, the CEO stating that he believed ACT would revolutionize the way safety would be trained in the 21st Century. Such encouragement made Moran aware that ACT could be applied not to just clinical cases but to every area of performance. Currently, in addition to his work with Quality Safety Edge, Moran runs his own firm—Pickslyde Consulting. “A pick slide is a guitar technique that signals exciting change in the music, so Pickslyde Consulting will signal exciting change in your company,” Moran comments.

Today Moran travels frequently from his home base in Chicagoland’s suburbs. “I’m happy to be a part of the QSE team,” he says. “I’ve had some good experiences there including going to Kuwait, Brazil, and around the country. It’s cool that I work for QSE and live so close to Chicago, because I can fly anywhere from O’Hare.”He and his wife, college sweetheart Jenny, have two children, daughter Harmony, 12-years-old, and son Louden, 11-years-old. Both children enjoy the company of many cousins who also live in the same area—they are the 23rd and 25th grandchildren!

For 2012, Moran plans to have a book ready for the October Behavioral Safety Now (BSN) conference that explains ACT to supervisors and front-line employees. “I think it really could have significant impact on the way that work is done, not just safety,” he says. “I envision talking about ACT in general with specific chapters on leadership, sales, performance management, innovation, and of course, safety. 2012 is going to be about bringing ACT, BBS, and behavioral interventions to companies, organizations and industries.”

For Moran, 2012 will also be about family time. He’s the assistant coach of his daughter’s soccer team and participates in his son’s sports and Boy Scout activities. In all of his spare time, he’s training for the New York Marathon taking place this November. So what ever happened to that lollipop plan? “I went to four years of college, then grad school, and then we were engaged and got married a few years later,” says Moran. “I still had it, but by then that lollipop had definitely seen better days.”

It seems as though Bob Foxworthy, Senior Vice President, Quality Safety Edge (QSE), is in a different country every week and in the interim racking up frequent- flyer miles. Ironically, this world traveler, who grew up in Fort Myers, Florida, is the same person who thought he had moved to “the North” when he first moved to Atlanta, Georgia. “My parents never traveled,” he explains. “Atlanta was the farthest north I’d ever gone.”

Foxworthy moved to the “northern” city of Atlanta to attend college at Emory University. There his penchant for taking a fork in the road seemed to have awakened. For example, he was a psychology major up until the last day of his junior year when he decided to rethink his academic focus. “I was disappointed at the lack of sanity of the professors in the psychology department, so I changed fields,” he says. The new field was geology, because he discovered that his pre-med, science, and math courses would apply to that department’s curriculum. “I thought perhaps I would go into exploration for the oil companies,” he explains.

After completing his undergraduate degree, Foxworthy applied to pharmaceutical school and was accepted, but he changed his mind again and decided to stick it out at Emory as a graduate student majoring in chemistry. That’s when a pivotal event brought him back into the world of psychiatry. He learned of a volunteer position at Georgia Regional Hospital and after being interviewed and accepted, he began working there on the children’s unit. “I discovered that I loved it,” says Foxworthy. “It was very different from the experiences I had at Emory University. Suddenly a whole world of applied psychology opened up for me.”

It was the mid-seventies and Foxworthy found himself in a hospital that was well-funded (strongly supported by then-governor Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn) and run by an innovative staff that included psychiatrists, medical doctors, music therapists, educational specialists, social workers, special-education therapists, RNs and LPNs. “It was a very rich, eclectic environment. The idea was to use whatever worked for the patients including behavior modification,” Foxworthy recalls. He soon found himself being mentored by three Cuban psychiatrists: Dr. Blanca Anton, her husband Dr. Manny Anton, and Dr. Adolpho Ponce de Leon. “These three people were all board-certified child psychiatrists. They took an interest in me, treated me as an intern, and they changed my life completely,” Foxworthy comments.

Foxworthy had studied Spanish, listened to Radio Havana, as a seven year old in South Florida, and was surrounded by Spanish-speaking people during his childhood in pre-Disneyworld Florida, which he describes as then being more like a Caribbean country than the Unites States. “Although Florida was actually geographically further south, I didn’t really enter the Deep South until I went north to Georgia,” he jokes. His knowledge of Spanish became a mutually beneficial skill set for him and for the doctors. “Their Cuban accents clashed with the Southern accents and Atlanta slang.  I understood both idioms fairly well and served as a translator between psychiatrists and patients,” he says.

In fact, Foxworthy spent so much time at the hospital that the doctors suggested he apply for a paying position there. He applied and was hired as a psychological technician with the duties of administering the behavioral treatment plans designed by the unit psychologist. Foxworthy was eventually promoted to that position where he designed behavioral treatment plans and ran a token economy for the patients. After completing his master’s of education specializing in psychological services and counseling from Georgia State University, Foxworthy joined his mentors as a counselor in a new clinic where as part of his development he attended therapy coaching. “I was trained in how to listen during those sessions and that was one of the most important lessons in my life,” he says.

At this point his colleagues confronted him with an intervention of sorts. They convened in his office and told him they all agreed that he should attend medical school. He protested that his grades weren’t high enough and that he was too old . . . he was a ripe old 24 years of age at that point. “Okay, then why don’t you apply to medical school in Spain or Brazil?” they asked. He did and was accepted to the University of Granada in Spain. However, by the time the school sent him a letter of acceptance, Foxworthy had given up on hearing from them and had purchased a pricey trip to Brazil. With the naiveté of youth, he wrote the school a letter asking them to postpone his acceptance for one year. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I probably shouldn’t have written that letter. I should have just gone,” he now admits.

Instead, he trekked off on his journey to Brazil where several students there convinced him to apply to a Brazilian medical school. Upon his return to Atlanta, Foxworthy sold his possessions, said goodbye to his friends and family, and left for Brazil with the intentions of never returning. Once there he began studying Portuguese, but encountered yet another fork in the road. His plans fell through due to red tape and financial demands. “That experience was a very good one for me. I put everything I had financially, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually into this endeavor to learn Portuguese and get into the medical school there in Rio. And it didn’t work out. It actually has become one of the strongest life lessons for me I’ve ever had . . .  to have the experience of doing everything I can do and still not winning. That may sound odd since I didn’t achieve what I went after, but I came back with more than I thought I would gain. I came back with a great knowledge of myself and a growing understanding of cultural differences. So I returned to Atlanta and got a job with Peachtree Parkwood Hospital, again in the children’s unit , he also latter worked at Georgia Health Institute (GMHI),” he relates.

Strangely enough, Foxworthy’s acquisition of Portuguese played a major role in meeting his wife of 35 years. He responded to a request by Georgia State University to act as a translator for several Brazilian diplomats at a function held in Underground Atlanta’s Golden Dolphin restaurant. Foxworthy showed up, but the Brazilians didn’t. His future wife had also arrived for the occasion and they struck up a conversation. “I was speaking to her in Portuguese. She was from Peru and was speaking to me in Spanish. She thought I was Brazilian the whole night,” says Foxworthy.  “She and her family speak Spanish, so I hear Spanish every day and I now watch the tele-novelas with my mother-in-law.”

Today Bob and his wife, Teresa, have four grown and very accomplished children. One of his twin daughters, Natalie and her husband work in the Embassy of the United States, in Manila, Philippines. The couples’ work moves them to a different country approximately every two years. Currently they are learning Croatian in preparation for relocation to Bosnia. Cecilia, Natalie’s twin, ran a New York based enterprise—Global Goods Partners—a small firm helping women in third-world countries to design, develop, and market their goods and handicrafts in the United States. She currently works and lives in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and travels the world connecting with artisans. She has also lived in Costa Rica and has spent months camping and traveling throughout Africa. Carlos, Foxworthy’s oldest son, is a successful graphics designer and computer animator who has developed ad campaigns for high-profile clients such as National Geographic and Apple Computer. The younger son, Alex, is completing his doctorate in neuroscience at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Of course, Foxworthy is very proud of his children. “Our goal was to raise children who were successful by their definition . . .  and sane. I think we’ve done that,” he says. “I’m very pleased that they all have interesting, exciting, and challenging career paths.”

Foxworthy’s career path could be described similarly. After his years with Georgia Regional followed by his years as a mental health counselor, he joined a behavioral consulting firm founded by Fran Tarkenton—better known at the time for his NFL career than for his new company, Behavior Systems, Incorporated (BSI). BSI was one of the first, if not the first, consulting firms to apply behavioral methods to business. “That was experimental in those days,” says Foxworthy. “No one had ever done that before and the big question was, ‘Will it work in business?’ because what we were doing certainly worked in the hospital.” At BSI, Foxworthy was trained via behavioral methods in how to be a consultant. “I’d have 30 behaviors to master in a month, for example, and if I mastered 100 percent of the behaviors, I received 100 percent of my salary. If I only mastered  80 percent, I only received 80 percent of my salary,” he explains. At BSI, where he worked for five years, Foxworthy enjoyed working with clients such as Milliken Textiles, Exxon, and Pan American World Airways. He even had his own office in the Miami International Airport.

He later joined Wilson Learning as a commissioned salesman/consultant for training services where he remained for four years before opening his own consulting firm: Foxworthy Consulting International at which time he joined with Aubrey Daniels International in a large project with Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO). He later refocused on his own business which became quite lucrative with clients such as Tropicana, Ocean Spray, and the James River Paper Company. During those full-plate years he helped the third largest law firm in the United States merge with the fourth largest law firm, making it the second largest law firm in America.

Approximately eight years ago, Foxworthy joined Quality Safety Edge, where he worked with Terry McSween and Jerry Pounds to land a contract with Lockheed-Martin. He has also worked in Chevron’s oil refinery in Wales, in Pascagoula Mississippi, and with Corporate Leaders in Houston and in Northern California. Another of Foxworthy's affiliations was with the Continuous Learning Group (CLG), and he also maintains a six-year consulting relationship with Crown Equipment Company in New Bremen, Ohio. When he isn’t traveling, Foxworthy lives in Virginia with his wife Teresa, their two Persian cats and their chocolate Lab. He has two grandchildren: Eva, two-years-old and Damien, four months. Foxworthy actually takes time for a hobby—painting in acrylics—before he has to hit the road (or the airways again). However, Foxworthy seems to experience his work as an adventure filled with opportunities rather than as a job. He describes it this way:

I’ve really had great luck in my life. I have had good fortune in the clients that I’ve worked with. I was wondering what I gain by traveling all the time and for most of my life working in some other state than the one I live in. What is it that I take away? Well, I get the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting people in the world and they actually become personal friends. That’s one of the things that has kept me going and it is also a source of satisfaction to see client metrics improve, whether in quality, production, reliability, safety, or leadership. The beauty of the behavioral model applied in business is seeing the numbers always increase and the results are often far beyond the expected!

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a super consultant!

Grainne Matthews, Ph.D., QSE’s Senior Vice President, Special Projects, was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, but almost 30 years ago a series of events precipitated her departure from her home country. She’s been a world traveler ever since. No one can say if life’s pathways are guided by fate, serendipity, or both, but Grainne’s career in psychology seemed almost a family tradition.

Her mother, now retired from a successful career as a clinical psychologist, was the head of the psychology department in the largest children’s hospital in the British Isles. Today, one of Grainne’s three younger sisters is currently the head of psychology for the pediatric cardiology unit in that same hospital. As a teenager, Grainne had a plan for seeing the world that was dismissed succinctly by her progressive-for-the-times father. “I wanted to be an airline stewardess, but he said, ‘No daughter of mine is going to serve people. If you’re working on a plane, you’ll be flying it,’” she recalls. “I was infuriated at the time, but I was very grateful in later years for his attitude. Later, I actually wanted to be a veterinarian, but I eventually landed up in psychology. I don’t regret it. It was actually one of those happy coincidences in my life.”

Grainne earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in clinical psychology at University College Dublin (UCD), but discovered after graduation that no positions were available in Ireland. “The economy had been bad for so long and psychological services were provided by the state through the Health Department. They only funded one position per region and they were filled. Unless somebody died or retired, nobody was going to get a job. So I was at a loss,” she explains. That’s when another “coincidence” occurred. Grainne just happened to spot a notice on the school bulletin board. The notice offered a fully funded master’s in behavior analysis and therapy. Master’s students worked at Project 12 Ways, a behavioral program to help abused and neglected children with in-home services for their parents. It seemed a promising possibility, but one in a different world—America. Grainne applied and at the ripe old age of 21 left for Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.  “I had no idea what behavior analysis was but this was a way to take a next step. So I got my master’s in behavior analysis and therapy, and loved it! I just totally fell in love with the objectiveness and the practicality of behavior analysis and the scientific approach. It was just so refreshing after traditional psychology,” Grainne states.  Luckily again, Grainne met several other Irish students in the same program which gave her a comfort-zone enclave to stave off home sickness.

Up until this point, Grainne had worked in a series of jobs to support herself through college. However, she began the first position in her new career at Pressley Ridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a school and facility for troubled children, adults and families. She soon found that even though she was to devise treatment programs for the entire population there, her main charge was to get the staffs of group homes, foster homes, special-education classrooms, and sheltered workshops, to actually implement the programs.  “I found myself in a management position. I wasn’t doing psychological services; I was managing other people doing them and I had no idea how to do it! I knew that I should be applying the same principals to the behavior of the target person, but I just didn’t know how!” she confesses.

Grainne hit the literature, often reading articles in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. She established measurement and feedback systems for the staff, but she wasn’t satisfied. Tired of the long winters in Pennsylvania, she relocated to Houston after acquiring a job there as the chief psychologist for three counties in the community-based Mental Health/Retardation Services (HMRS.) She stayed with the organization managing the treatment program for about three years, but realized she needed more. That’s when she pulled up anchor again and headed to Western Michigan University (WMU) to earn her doctorate in organizational behavior analysis. During the five years of completing the program, Grainne once again grew tired of the harsh winters, but she soon received several offers for positions with behavioral safety organizations. “I never regret making the decision to join Quality Safety Edge,” she says. “Terry’s [McSween, president] integrity just comes through in so many ways.” 

That was 15 years ago and Grainne remembers with fondness how the late Wanda Meyers mentored her when she first joined the company. “Wanda taught me everything I know about relating to frontline employees. Every frontline employee that she has ever worked with loved her, loved her! They would have gone to the ends of the Earth for her. I started working with her on the Citgo project in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in a 1500-employee refinery. She had worked there for ten years implementing behavioral safety in area after area and they planned for her to just keep working with them until the cows came home.” 

What was the primary lesson that Grainne learned from her mentor? Grainne answers: “To treat every single person as a potential best friend, to regard each one as an individual not just a person on the staff who needs to get in line with the program. Wanda always took time to learn everybody’s name, information about their family, their wives’ names, their children’s names, their health situation, and even their hobbies. She treated people with the respect that behavioral safety tries to inculcate into an organization. She modeled the principals that are behind behavioral safety. And she always gave positive feedback.”

These lessons stayed with Grainne, not as a strategy, but as a value. Doing so has brought many rewards. “I always look for the smallest, smallest improvement and acknowledge that. Grown men, great big oil refinery workers and chemical plant workers, all bulked up in their PPE have said, ‘That was the best training I ever had. You actually embodied the principals that you are trying to get us to use,’ or ‘You’re the only consultant who ever talked to me as a human being,’” she explains. “That’s why I keep doing what I do.”

Grainne also credits Judith Stowe, QSE Co-founder and Senior Program Director, with teaching her an important skill. “What I learned from Judy that is much harder to implement is to learn as much as possible about the work that the people do every day: the tasks, the equipment, the tools, the structure of their work, and their schedules to really understand their situation. That way when I’m talking to them, I’m using examples that make sense. I’m talking about how we’re going to apply it to their schedule, their work rhythms and tasks. Becoming that familiar with multiple industries and many companies is very difficult for me. It’s very interesting, but it’s really challenging to go from a utility to an oil company to a manufacturing site and then rotate back– and still remember the names of the equipment, the ins-and-outs of the schedules, and the specific work done by each team,” she says. 

However, Grainne seems to have acquired that skill. She has helped people successfully implement behavior-based safety in refineries, construction sites, manufacturing sites, and utility plants. In fact, she has worked with so many utilities—among them Manitoba Hydro and Enmax in Canada; CenterPoint Energy in Houston, Texas; and Tucson Electric Power, in Tucson, Arizona—that McSween has dubbed her the Vice President of Utilities.  Grainne also specializes in construction after developing an approach that addresses the special structure of that industry.  “In the construction industry, they go from zero staff to a big project where they bring in one crew after the other such as cement workers, then iron workers, electricians, and plumbers. You have to figure out how you’re going to involve subcontractors and rotating crews and how you are going to quickly train people in a way that doesn’t break the bank and allows them to participate during the duration of their work on that project site,” she comments.

Today Grainne is an official resident of Houston, but one would hardly know it, as she spends an average of half the year on the road . . . or in the air. She isn’t flying the plane, but she’s a passenger with a purpose: helping organizations around the world implement behavior-based safety. Grainne tries to visit her family once or twice a year as she did when working in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scotland. She recently made several trips to Slovakia implementing behavior-based safety in an international company’s manufacturing plant. She has also worked with Spanish-only employees in Texas, prompting her to study Spanish.  Her free-time activities include practicing a form of martial arts called Cha Yon Roo and caring for her African Gray parrot, Bogart. “When I come home, as soon as I put my key in the door he says, ‘Where are you?’ And then when I walk in the room, he says ‘I love you!’” Grainne says.  Since learning Spanish has become one of her focused goals, who knows? One day Bogart may greet her with the words, “Te Quiero!”

When Mike Johnson was 16, he asked his father if he could borrow his brand new Olds ’88 to drive to a late-night basketball practice. His dad gave him the keys, but after practice Mike had the typical teenage-guy idea. “When I got to the end of the driveway at the school, I decided to see how this thing would really run,” he relates. “So I stomped on the accelerator and peeled out. I mean blue smoke was coming off the back tires. About the time I let up on the accelerator, blue lights came up behind me.”

The little town of Saline, Michigan, (population 1800 at the time), where Mike’s father had relocated his family from Quincy, Illinois, was a prototype for Mayberry, RFD, with one sheriff—Sheriff Kirby. Kirby knew Mike’s Dad as a business owner and a member of the town council. When he walked up to the car window, he asked Mike one question, “Are you going to tell him or am I?” Mike answered, “I will.”

Mike went home, gave his father the car keys and his license and said, “Give those back to me in a month.” His dad said okay. “After a month, I got my keys back. Until the day he died, my dad never asked me what happened,” he says. “But I knew, he knew.”

Mike is a good storyteller and Vice President Domestic Sales for Quality Safety Edge (QSE). He’s also the program chair for the annual Behavioral Safety Now (BSN) conference—a fulltime job unto itself. Mike reviews all program submissions for keynotes, presenters, and papers and runs those submissions through the program committee members to ensure that attendees receive the information about safety—predominantly behavior-based safety (BBS) processes—that they expect. “Our audience is primarily frontline employees,” he explains. “Companies often use attendance at BSN as a reward for the effort, diligence, and participation in their safety processes. We want to make sure that people who want to present will contribute to the conference in a meaningful way.”

After five years of chairing the conference, the unexpected still happens, often down to the wire, with the inevitable, last-minute schedule and presentation alterations. “It’s an avalanche of minutia and details and changes,” says Mike. “But I really love doing it. It keeps me actively involved in the conference and I’ve established good relationships and friendships with the people that attend.”

With “stem to stern” responsibility for QSE’s domestic sales and the BSN chairmanship, Mike has his hands full, but he’s used to a challenge. He doesn’t say much about his tour as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam conflict, but one would think that after that, not much can rattle his equilibrium. After leaving the service, he went to work as an industrial engineer for a large, multinational company that supplied the seats for General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. “I was mainly given the challenge of human-factors engineering. Back then you tried to guard the equipment so people could not get hurt even if they wanted to by using cages and light barriers and pullbacks and all kinds of stuff. It wasn’t always the right answer because that slowed the work down which made the cost go up,” he says. However, he must have done well in his position, because after five years, the company promoted him to plant superintendent. Four years later, he was the plant manager, and finally the general manager of four of the organization’s plants.

One day, a client approached him and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse—the position of General Manager/CFO for a furniture company. By this time, Mike had completed his MBA at Wake Forest to add a financial balance to his engineering experience and degree from Eastern Michigan University. After five years in that position, he took an executive position at Ruff Hewn, a clothing manufacturer. During his five-year stay there, sales doubled every year.

“Halfway through that period, I attended a four-day seminar in Washington DC to listen to Dr. Edwards Deming. It changed my life,” says Mike. “My whole approach to business—how to treat people and how to treat employees—was completely changed. It’s data-based, it’s involvement, and it’s getting them to participate, commit and stop telling them what to do. Ask them what they should be doing.”

As an example of his new view on management, Mike tells how the drivers at that organization constantly complained about the truck they had to use for deliveries: 

One driver was particularly vocal about the company not paying attention to employee needs. He came to me and said that we needed to replace the delivery truck. I said, ‘Okay go shopping.’ He picked a good truck with some features that prevented injuries when loading and unloading. I said, ‘Well tell me how much it is.’ I went to appropriations and they gave us the money and he had his truck. He was stunned. Well not only he was stunned but the others in the whole plant were stunned because now he was very vocal about saying, ‘They told me that what I needed was what we were going to get.’ That seminar changed my life and the whole way I approached management.

In the early 1990s, Mike went off on his own to work in the private-label business selling U.S. clothing to Japan. It was good business until the mid-90s market downturn, so Mike moved on to another management position. “I walked in the door and it was the same problems, the same issues, the same absenteeism, bad quality, returns, and late deliveries—all that kind of stuff,” he recalls. “Out of frustration after a couple of weeks I called my brother-in-law who was the head of Dow Chemical’s Quality Performance Initiative that completely turned that company around in terms of quality and productivity. I was telling him about my problems and he says, ‘Call Aubrey Daniels!’ and hung up the phone.” 

It was to be Mike’s next encounter with behavior-based Performance Management and also where he met Jerry Pounds, now QSE’s President, International Business. “Jerry did his thing and it flipped around the company. We were shipping on time 62-64 percent of the time, but in six months were shipping 99 percent of the time on time with a shorter lead time than we had before. We reduced our inventory turns from two to 15 times a year which made the bottom line of the company go up something like $2.5 million,” Mike says. 

Mike began appearing at events to tell people about the successes he had experienced using behavior-based management methods. He was so convincing that Aubrey Daniels offered him a sales job which he took and remained with until Marsh Consulting purchased the company’s safety business. That position went well until Marsh lost an unrelated suit and closed several consulting divisions. At about that time, Jerry called and asked, “Why don’t you come and work for QSE?”

That was six years ago and a positive development that in retrospect seems to tie together with all of his past career experience. “The circle does get smaller, doesn’t it?” Mike comments. Today, Mike and his wife Liza, live in Charleston, South Carolina. His two children Derek and Jenny have made them grandparents (Paw-Paw and Li-Li, respectively) with Derek’s son, Cal, and recently born daughter Sylvie, and Jenny’s daughters, Allie and Caroline. In his spare time, Mike confesses he is obsessed with crossword puzzles. Saddened over the loss of his 15-year-old Lab, he was persuaded by Liza to purchase a six-pound Yorkshire Terrier—Daisy. “She’s a real yipper. She thinks she’s a Doberman and she rules the house,” says Mike. At about this time of the interview, Liza remarks from another room that he’s telling too many stories. I do love to tell my stories all the time and she’s heard them all a thousand times,” he confesses with a laugh.