An article from the Associated Press (read entire article here) points out how unprepapred and overly optimistic BP was regarding any potential leak.

BP PLC’s 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company’s preparedness to deal with one, according to an Associated Press analysis. The lengthy plans were approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well.

If anything this spill has taught us, it is to assume the worst outcomes and that you are never prepared enough. This way, when something bad actually happens, you can actually do something about it…besides stand around for a few months as whatever panicked responses you have fails…over and over again.

Thought I would take a moment to promote a keynote that’s been getting more and more inquiries:

Being defensive in an offensive world
Safety First, Second and Last

From alligator wrestling to running with scissors, this humorous journey about a serious subject is fun, educational and motivational. A former employee of the Department of Safety and a certified instructor, Craig gives you a real-world view on how you can minimize incidents by using common sense, knowing what’s important and combating complacency.

Craig Price delivered! He was well received by everyone and his entertaining, high-energy style helped set the tone for our safety event. His ability to get straight to the point in such a funny and insightful way was exceptional. We were extremely pleased with the feedback we received from his keynote and will definitely use him again. Tom Kaul, Project Coordinator, Motiva Enterprises LLC

To get more information you can go to SpeakerCraigPrice.com to learn about all the keynotes and training I offer. 

One of the great things about negative thinking is that it fosters innovation. Finding improvements to already useful items is the sign of someone not satisfied. Why build a better mouse trap? You have a mouse trap! If it didn’t work it would be called the “Rat Buffett”. But we find things that need improvements.

Positive thinking can sometimes breed complacency. A positive thinking worker looks around and says “I love this place! Don’t change a thing!” Where a negative thinker says “I love this place! It would be even better if…” Does that mean you want to stock your office with negative thinking people. Not necessarily, but a few scattered around can really improve things.

Complacency is very dangerous when it comes to safety. Today I’m in Atlanta giving a keynote to Motiva Enterprises about safety and one of the key points I’ll make is that complacency is the start of a dangerous workplace. When you come to work in an environment that has dangers, you can’t relax. You can’t get comfortable. Doing so gets people hurt. Or worse. If you show up to work and nothing happens, and nothing happened last week and nothing dangerous happened last month, you let your guard down. Negative thinking reminds us that we’re working in a dangerous environment and we need to be alert. Do we need to worry so much that we’re scared? Of course not! But a little fear, a little doubt reminds us to be more careful.

So if you work in a dangerous workplace, try not to relax too much. Don’t worry, but be aware.

We wouldn’t want to have to change your nickname to “Stumpy” would we?

Nothing like an outdated tradition that caters to morons and other dim-wits. The annual “Running of the Bulls” is a prime example of people who need a little more negative thinking in their lives. From CNN:

Daredevils kicked off the running of the bulls Monday with a long, messy and particularly dangerous dash through the streets of Pamplona in northern Spain, with nine people suffering bumps and bruises but none gored, officials said.

Revelers react as Conde de La Corte’s fighting bulls pass by during the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, N. Spain.

The half-mile sprint through cobblestone streets turned chaotic because the pack of six half-ton beasts became separated early in the route after plowing into a crowd of people, some of them spectators.

Some of the bulls fell and two ended up running on their own. One of those became disoriented, trying several times to turn around and go back toward the starting point. But herders waving sticks eventually guided it to the bull ring where the course ends.

Inside the ring one black bull fell down and stayed there for nearly a minute, as jubilant runners scampered about.

The Spanish Red Cross said nine people were injured, with head or rib injuries from falling or getting trampled. It said five were Spanish and the rest were from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Britain. No names were given.

The whole run took just over four minutes, which is a bit slow by the standards of Pamplona’s Fiesta de San Fermin, as the festival is known.

It was the first of eight scheduled runs. The most crowded ones will be next weekend, when the throngs of thrill-seekers will swell dramatically as people pour into Pamplona from out of town for two days of revelry and Adrenalin.

The fact that this year’s festival began on a Monday meant a lighter turnout.

“There were a few tense moments, but I think everything went quite well. There were fewer people than at other times,” said 29-year-old runner Aritz Lopez, from Bilbao.

Many of Monday’s participants wore traditional white trousers and shirts and red kerchiefs around their necks. They carried rolled-up newspapers — a tool for gauging how far away a charging bull is.

Before the sprint, local runners paid tribute to a beloved Pamplona native, Inaki Ochoa de Olza, a veteran mountain climber who died in the Himalayas in May. He also was a regular runner at San Fermin.

The running of the bulls became world famous with the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises” and also is known for its all-night street parties.

Since record-keeping began in 1924, 14 runners have died.

The last fatality from a goring was a 22-year-old American, Matthew Tassio, in 1995. In 2003, a 63-year-old Pamplona native, Fermin Etxeberri, was trampled in the head by a bull and died after spending several months in a coma.

On Sunday a young man died after falling 30 yards from an ancient wall that encircles the old quarter of Pamplona. Authorities identified him Monday as Aidan Holly, a 23-year-old from Ireland, and quoted friends as saying he had been drinking.

The worst part about this is that the bulls seem the smartest running out there.

They’re just trying to run away.

Seems the media loves a good catastrophe-in-waiting. Instead of the usual Armageddon stories of asteroids, super volcanoes and pandemics, they’ve gone a bit more sci-fi. From CNN:

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists’ wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth?

Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

“Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on,” said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider’s huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

“If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here,” he said. Not that it would matter if it could destroy the entire planet.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn’t expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible “dark matter” and “dark energy” that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics’ unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is “no conceivable danger” of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was “a significant risk that … operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet.”

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN’s safety report, released June 20, “has several major flaws,” and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs’ allegations “extraordinarily speculative,” and said “there is no basis for any conceivable threat” from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived. (I love how they need to add this fact, just to make sure we are aware that “Yes Virginia, the Earth still exists!”)

“The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years,” said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

We could use them as landfills! Cool!

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth’s gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don’t seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

“There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC,” said project leader Evans.

Saw this at Network World and had to speak up.

For anyone who thinks negative thinking is not necessary, I give you Kellogg’s LEGO Fruit Flavored Snacks. Whoever came up with this legal booby-trap should be fired for being too positive. I can see them pitching the idea:

Positive Pitchman:

Kids love LEGOs right?

Kids love fruit flavored snacks.

Lets combine the two and make a fortune!

We’ll make the snacks look exactly like real LEGOs and let the rug rats go to town on them! It can’t lose!

Negative Thinker:

Uh…if they look just like real LEGOs, might kids start putting real LEGOs in their mouth? They could choke.

PP:

Get this jerk out of here! We’re trying to make money. Kids aren’t stupid enough to think that a LEGO snack is anything like a regular LEGO. They taste completely different!

So I wish Kellogg’s good luck with their new snack. They’ll need it.

Some ideas will always sound bad. No matter how tasty they may be.

Sunday, June 1^st was the official first day of hurricane season. Being prepared for a hurricane could save your life. It’s also an example of negative thinking working for you. Now, with the help of KPRC (not that they know or sponsor this…though they could!) I give you their Hurricane Survival Checklist:

Water

18½ gallons of water per person (½ gallon for drinking, 2 gallons for bathing)

Store water in clean plastic containers

Food

Purchase foods that require no refrigeration and little preparation, such as:

Ready-to-eat canned food with non-electric can opener

Canned juices, canned milk, soup (if powdered, store extra water)

Snacks: cookies, cereals, etc.

Soft drinks, instant coffee, tea

Lots of ice (you can freeze your water supply)

For Baby

Formula, bottles, powdered milk, jarred baby foods

Diapers, moist towelettes and special medications

Pets

Newspapers or cat litter

Moist canned foods (to preserve water)

Plastic sheets to cover floor of pet’s room

Medicine

First aid kit

Rubbing alcohol

Aspirin, non-aspirin pain reliever, antacid

Extra prescription medication (especially for heart problems and diabetes)

Ask your physician how to store prescription medication

Personal Items

Toilet paper, towels, soap, shampoo

Personal and feminine hygiene products

Denture needs, contact lenses and an extra pair of eyeglasses

Sun protection, insect repellent

Other Supplies

Battery-operated radio, flashlights, non-electric can opener, extra batteries

Charcoal, waterproof matches, extra propane gas for grills (Use grills outside only!)

ABC-rated fire extinguisher in a small canister

Portable cooler

Plenty of absorbent towels, plastic trash bags

Wind-up or battery-operated clock

Tarp or sheet plastic, duct tape, hammer and nails for temporary roof repairs

Cleaning supplies such as chlorine bleach

Aluminum foil, paper napkins and plates, plastic cups

Can of spray paint (can be used to identify your home by insurance adjusters in case it’s damaged)

At least one change of clothing per person, sturdy shoes, hat and work gloves

Pillows and blankets or sleeping bags

I hope it’s a short and boring hurricane season and that Houston and Southeast Texas are ignored this year. But I won’t bet on it.

Just taking a moment to get some business out of the way. This is a business blog after all. J

Whenever I give a keynote, people always come up to me afterward and want to know how they can get more information. An hour doesn’t begin to cover they uses of negative thinking. Below is just one of the programs I have developed and delivered to companies and agencies across the country with proven results. 

The Power of Negative Thinking: Positive Solutions for Success – Full Day (6.5 hour) or Half Day (3 hour) Training Program

This program shows participants how to explore their natural thought processes to create a consistently successful approach. This innovative, entertaining program takes a realistic look at how to convert negative feelings and thoughts into productivity.  Various versions focus on Customer Service, Change Management, Executive Management, Safety and Goal Setting as this program is customized for both your company and your specific industry.

Suggested Agenda:

•    Why we think the way we do

•    Realistic goal setting

•    The origin of true confidence: The art of critical thinking

•    Understanding problems and providing positive solutions

•    The power of saying “no”

•    Responding effectively to negative people

•    Complainers, gossipers and other mistakes

•    Creating productivity by embracing the negativity of others

•    How to use your natural insights: Being prepared for problems

•    The value of negative experiences: Creating success from failure

•    Managing expectations

•    Controlling the dark side: Negativity as a tool, not a lifestyle

To learn more: email craig@wynnsolutions.com or call 888.866.2902

Ran across this unbelievably stupid product today and wondered how many people are going to accidentally shock themselves while trying to change songs(From the Telegraph):

Music fans who spend hours selecting their perfect jogging playlist now face a new dilemma. What track to listen to as you Taser someone?

A combined stun gun-MP3 player may well be the most bizarre gadget to be unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The device – formally known as the Taser Music Player Holster – has already earned the nickname the iTaser.

The manufacturers hope the gun will be particularly popular among women, and have made it available in available in “red-hot” red, “fashion” pink and even leopardskin print for customers who are as style conscious as they are safety conscious.

“These new product are a result of listening to our customers. Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable,” said Rick Smith, founder of Taser International.

“A lot of women aren’t going to go into a gun store and feel comfortable enough buying a Taser, so now we have some outdoor companies and dealers – some cellphone places are starting to carry them and hang them next to phones.”

Mr Smith says he hopes women who are reluctant to take a standard Taser gun out in their handbag will be happier to carry the “iTaser” around with them when they are out of the house.

If people are reluctant to own something that can hurt another person, it’s best not to press the issue…but hey, maybe that’s just me!

The device’s stun gun fires a 50,000-volt electric charge. But the ampage of the shock the victim receives is as low as 0.00.21 amps, hence its popularity with police forces around the world as a non-lethal incapacitation tool.

The built-in MP3 player can store 1GB of songs.

Around 7,000 of the designer C2 Tasers have already been sold in the US, according to reports.

7000 people wandering the streets, listening to their tunes, waiting to accidently tase someone. The whole concept seems out of whack.

Amnesty International claims the guns have been linked to more than 70 deaths in the US, although the American authorities do not consider Tasers to be firearms.

If the general population becomes as taser-happy as the cops have become…we could be heading towards some “shocking” developments. (Sorry for the pun. Had to do it, though.)

I just liked the link title CNN used on its front page: Don’t be an idiot holiday shopper. Too bad they chickened out on the actual article headline. J

It is important that during this fun and festive time we don’t forget to sprinkle a dash of negativity around to make this a safe and happy holidays. So here are some tips from Gary Beckwith with the Evening Chronicle:

Never use electric lights on a metallic tree. The tree can become charged with electricity from faulty lights and if someone touches a branch they could get electrocuted.

Before using lights outside, check labels to be sure they have been certified for outdoor use. To hold lights in place, string them through hooks or insulated staples, not nails or tacks.

Use only non-combustible or flame-resistant materials to trim a tree. Choose tinsel or artificial icicles of plastic or non-leaded metals.

In homes with small children, take special care to avoid decorations that are sharp or breakable, keep trimmings with small removable parts out of the reach of children to avoid swallowing or inhaling small pieces.

Make sure artificial trees are fire resistant and keep real trees away from fireplaces, radiators or portable heaters.

Never overload electrical sockets and always switch off Christmas lights and unplug them before going to bed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzMUxMp1ndk

By thinking of the few bad things that could happen, you can avoid them entirely!

Thanks for getting me to 3000 hits. The last 1000 came in 14days.

Happy Holidays!!