About
The VICTORY Code comes out of a working life spent in the fire service, in North Sea oil and gas operations, and in an independent practice advising organisations where the consequences of getting leadership wrong land on people rather than on a balance sheet.
The career
Strathclyde Fire Brigade, 1968 to 1980. Fire engineering, fire prevention, training and operational firefighting. Officer in charge of the Glasgow south side fire prevention department, and officer in charge of the operational headquarters station at Clydebank, covering shipbuilding, an oil terminal, factories and rural premises.
BP, 1980 to 1999. Ten years offshore in the North Sea as health and safety adviser to the offshore management team and emergency commander, including a project in Indonesia. Nine years onshore after that, latterly as health, safety, security and environmental adviser on the ETAP development, where an integrated management system built across ten applications and several vendors allowed a production platform to be operated by 51 people rather than around 150.
The work
Leadership and transformational coach in the Major Accident Hazards sector. Coaching, facilitation and speaking, with organisations in energy, steel and the public sector, in the UK, the Middle East, Africa and eastern Europe.
The practice
The independent practice ran from 1999 and closed on retirement in 2021.
The work since has been independent research into human and organisational factors: the conditions under which people speak up, the distance between written procedure and actual practice, and what leadership behaviour does to both. The book is argued from it.
Stronger, Smarter, Safer publishes weekly and is past three hundred episodes, and the book has been in the writing alongside.
Credentials
- Member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, MIOSH (retired). Chartered Member of the Institution from 2005 to 2021.
- Member of the Institution of Fire Engineers (MIFireE) since 1978, and President of the Institution's Scottish Branch from 2004 to 2009.
- Member of the Chartered Management Institute (MCMI).
- MSc in Process Safety and Loss Control, Sheffield University, 1997.