human capital management

A Review of the Pyramid and Swiss Cheese Models

by Ron Moore

The safety pyramid was first proposed by H.W. Heinrich, whose 1931 book, “Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach,” stated that 88 percent of accidents are caused by “unsafe acts of persons” and put forth what is often referred to as Heinrich’s accident pyramid.

by: William Hillman

A 2013 paper titled, The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, by Justin R. Pierce, an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and Peter K.Schott, Yale School of Management and the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs is a result of imports from China¹. Regardless of the cause, the fact is that U.S. manufacturing has declined over the past several years. Along with the decline in jobs, there has been a decline in the technical skills needed for performing manufacturing jobs. The loss of technical skills is largely due to the fact that as manufacturing jobs declined, job training refocused to other areas, such as service sector jobs.This all happened at a time when baby boomers, who were the backbone of American manufacturing, began leaving the workplace in droves due to retirement. The age of the baby boomers is rapidly coming to an end, but due to the decline in manufacturing, there's been no concerted effort to replace them.

America began to acknowledge its cultural obsession with "busyness" a few years ago, when Tim Kreider wrote the now legendary piece "The Busy Trap" for the New York Times. Nearly three years later, while our culture certainly hasn't changed, an admitted addiction to busyness has at least transitioned from groundbreaking journalism to mainstream conversations.

by Vivek Wadhwa
Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

By Jessica Dieken, director of marketing and sales for Pioneer Engineering