My book is published
I left corporate life in April. I did not retire. I’m running full speed ahead with HSE Engineering LLC, focusing on process-safety training and consulting.
Process Safety Excellence: A Practical Reference for Operating Companies is now available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle format. Written for the people who operate, maintain, and lead the work around process equipment, the 461-page book includes over 300 implementation lessons I’ve learned over four decades. I’m also hosting a 30-minute webinar at 11:00 a.m. on September 24 about putting the book to use.
Written for the operating company
Most process-safety literature and training are written for specialists. I am a process-safety expert, but I did not write this book only for other specialists. I wrote it for the people who operate, maintain, inspect, design, modify, and lead the work around process equipment.
Nothing is watered down. The technical content is rigorous and covered in depth but focuses on practical implementation. The book moves through four parts:
Process Safety Foundations. Establishes a common understanding of hazards, risk, and safeguards.
Risk-Based Process Safety. High-level summary of the management system that organizes and sustains the work.
Technical Safety. Connects engineering standards, the operating envelope, and engineered safeguards to operating decisions.
Process Safety Leadership. Addresses human and organizational performance (HOP), cost and production pressure, managing abnormal conditions, and communicating risk upward, across, and downward.
Responsibility is not enough
Operational leaders remain central to the book’s purpose. They make decisions where technical requirements, operating conditions, production demands, and human performance meet.
But operational leaders, from frontline supervisors to plant managers, do not work alone. They depend on engineering, maintenance, projects, process-safety specialists, company trainers, site leadership, and senior leadership.
Giving operations responsibility does not, by itself, create operational ownership. Responsibility must be supported by competency, usable information, resources, technical backing, and the organizational standing to challenge a decision or escalate a risk when necessary.
The same problem exists across organizational functions. Technical knowledge may remain with a specialist. Design intent may not follow a project into operations. Field conditions may not reach the functional owner of the technical information. A corporate requirement may not connect cleanly with the realities of the unit.
I spent four decades learning this work, some of it the hard way. The people now making decisions about process equipment should not have to learn it that way.
Join me for a 30-minute discussion
I'll briefly go over the book and field any questions.
Thursday, September 24, 2026 | 11:00–11:30 a.m. Central | Live on Zoom | No cost | Recording sent to registrants.
If you lead a crew, shift, unit, or site, or your work supports those leaders, this session is for you.