Risk Management -
What Asbestos Taught Me About Managing Risk - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
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As a manager with Johns-Manville and its successor, the Manville Corporation, for more than 30 years, I witnessed one of the most colossal corporate blunders of the twentieth century. This blunder was not the manufacture and sale of a dangerous product. Hundreds of companies make products more dangerous than asbestos—deadly chemicals, explosives, poisons—and the companies and their employees thrive. Manville’s blunder was not even its frequently cited failure to warn workers and customers of what it knew to be the dangers of asbestos during the 1940s, when so much of the damage to workers’ health was done. Given the exigencies of war and the widespread indifference to environmental dangers at that time, it would have taken more than warnings to prevent the tragedy.
In
my opinion, the blunder that cost thousands of lives and destroyed an
industry was a management blunder, and the blunder was denial.
Asbestosis—a nonmalignant lung disease brought on by breathing asbestos
fibers—had been known since the early 1900s, and the first indications
of a connection between asbestos and lung cancer appeared in the 1930s.
But Manville managers at every level were unwilling or unable to believe
in the long-term consequences of these known hazards. They denied, or
at least failed to acknowledge, the depth and persistence of management
accountability.
Managers at every level refused to believe in the long-term consequences of known hazards.
Had
the company responded to the dangers of asbestosis and lung cancer with
extensive medical research, assiduous communication, insistent
warnings, and a rigorous dust-reduction program, it could have saved
lives and would probably
have saved the stockholders, the industry, and, for that matter, the
product. (Asbestos still has applications for which no other material is
equally suited, and, correctly used, it could be virtually risk free.)
But Manville and the rest of the asbestos industry did almost nothing of
significance—some medical studies but no follow-through, safety
bulletins and dust-abatement policies but no enforcement, acknowledgment
of hazards but no direct warnings to downstream customers—and their
collective inaction was ruinous.
The
fundamental lesson I’ve learned in my 30 years in the asbestos and
fiberglass industries is that, to be more than an empty gesture,
responsibility must be overt, proactive, and farsighted. At Manville,
denial became endemic to the corporate culture, so much so that even
after top executives had recognized health and safety as a critical
issue, many middle- and lower-level managers continued to hide behind
rationalizations and the letter of what they took to be the law.
I
am not going to write about what and when Manville managers knew or
didn’t know about the dangers of asbestos. In one sense, it hardly
matters because the standard for product liability that I see applied
today—partly as a result of the asbestos litigation—seems to build on
the principle that companies are responsible for product hazards whether
or not they knew about product dangers. This is a retroactive standard,
of course, but it is the same standard we apply to every other
management activity. We expect executives to anticipate and preevaluate
market trends, capital requirements, staffing needs, research, new
product developments, competitive pressures, and much, much more. We
also expect them constantly to question their companies’ practices and
procedures. When executives fail to foresee the future at least enough
to prevent business setbacks, they pay a penalty in compensation,
promotion, or job security. Now juries and the courts demand no less in
the area of product liability. For the New Jersey Supreme Court, not
even “unknowability”—the absence of any scientific evidence that a
product may be harmful—is an adequate defense.1
To
protect employees, customers, stockholders, society, and the business
itself from product and production hazards, managers must go well beyond
appearances, union demands, and the letter of the law. They must
anticipate and lead the drive to head off environmental hazards and
risks. They must study, analyze, assess, communicate, and prevent the
damage their methods and products might cause.
I
am not speaking on some abstract moral plane. I learned these lessons
the hard way, as a participating eyewitness to some of the worst
outcomes a corporation can experience. Employees and customers suffered
disabilities and died, and Manville was eventually required to help fund
a personal-injury-settlement trust fund with $150 million in cash, $1.6 billion in bonds, 80% of the company’s common stock, and, beginning in 1992 and continuing for as long as there are claims to settle, 20% of company profits.
Remarkably,
however, my experiences as the manager of an asbestos plant and later
as the head of Manville’s fiberglass group also taught me that what is
now called product stewardship—the active acceptance of product and
production responsibility—yields short-term as well as long-term
benefits, among them profit, survival, and even competitive advantage.
I
went to work for Manville in June 1960, fresh from college and four
years in the Marine Corps. When I joined it, Manville was the largest
producer of asbestos products in the United States and the largest
producer of asbestos fiber in the Western world, with 500 product lines
and 33 plants and mines across the United States and Canada. To me,
Manville seemed an ideal employer—an old-guard, blue-chip industrial
giant, a member of the Fortune “500” and the Dow-Jones industrial average. “The bluest of the blue,” Forbes once called it.
Since
its founding in 1858, Manville had specialized in asbestos, a “miracle”
substance with unique properties—fireproof, lightweight, durable,
strong, an excellent insulator—that made it indispensable for hundreds
of industrial and commercial applications. During World War II, the
government declared asbestos a strategic material, and its use
mushroomed. So did its misuse. In wartime shipyards, workers installed
asbestos below decks in conditions of intense heat and dust described by
one eyewitness as a glimpse of hell. Even outside the shipyards,
asbestos plants and fabricating shops tolerated dust standards that were
later shown to be far too high.
Working conditions in wartime shipyards were a little glimpse of hell.
Later,
often decades later, the people who worked in those plants, shops, and
shipyards began to develop asbestos-related diseases, including several
forms of cancer. Tens of thousands were disabled or died. Claims that
they and their survivors brought against the company came to hundreds of
millions of dollars. In 1982, Manville filed for Chapter 11 protection
and was on its way to the top of Fortune’s
list of least admired corporations. The company was reorganized in
1988, and its stockholders—many of them Manville workers or retired
workers—lost as much as 98% of their equity.
In
1960, I was ignorant of company history; I knew very little about the
dangers of the product, which few employees understood well and still
fewer discussed; and of course I had no inkling of the future. I started
in sales, moved to marketing, and then, in 1968, I switched to
production as a manager in training. After some brief hands-on
experience as a supervisor at the Manville, New Jersey, plant, I packed
up my family and headed for Waukegan, Illinois, to see if I could turn
around a plant that made asbestos-cement pipe and ranked at the bottom
of the heap in both productivity and profit.
The
plant lay at the back of a sprawling complex built in the 1920s, its
view of Lake Michigan obscured by a landfill several stories high. The
road wound through this mountain of asbestos-laden scrap, and as I drove
it for the first time, I stopped to watch a bulldozer crush a 36-inch
sewer pipe. A cloud of dust swirled around my car.
Corrugated
asbestos-cement panels covered the outside of the nearly windowless
building. Inside, a forklift picked up a pallet of finished couplings
and moved off in the dingy light, leaving a trail of dust. People told
me things had improved. At one time, they said, you couldn’t see from
one end of the building to the other. But I saw asbestos dust on every
ledge and purlin, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
Waukegan
was a grueling experience right from the start. In sales, when you stop
work, the selling function stops. In a continuous manufacturing
operation, the machines keep running and endless problems devour every
moment, night and day. Whenever the phone rang at home, I would hold my
breath until I knew it wasn’t someone calling from the plant. No one
ever called with good news.
The
task I’d been set was to increase productivity, but over the next two
years, I discovered that low productivity had its roots in more basic
problems. For example, conventional wisdom had it that the plant’s poor
performance was due to poor labor relations and a recalcitrant union
that blocked productivity improvements. The truth, I learned, was a good
deal more complex. For one thing, the plant’s profit squeeze had caused
previous managers to defer proper maintenance, which greatly increased
downtime. For another, the lack of proper maintenance in the area of
dust control was seriously affecting employee behavior. For a third,
Manville’s management culture had developed an unhealthy streak of
cynicism. Too many engineers and middle managers had come to the
conclusion—incorrectly, as events were to show—that workers were
necessarily a part of the problem and not of the solution, that money
could not be found for adequate upkeep, and that change was impossible.
Sometimes
just by chance, sometimes by self-education and determination,
sometimes in sheer desperation, I managed to turn most of this
conventional wisdom on its head. But my learning curve was a series of
painful shocks and confrontations.
To begin with, I lost my innocence about asbestos-related diseases. I encountered several new words: dusted,red case, and mesothelioma. Dusted
was a shop-floor term for a person incapacitated by asbestosis. Severe
lung changes, identified by X ray during physical examinations, were
called red cases.
When the doctor found changes like these, he would direct me to assign
the worker in question to a “nondusty” area, which was a good deal
easier said than done.
People
at the plant seldom talked about asbestos diseases. Everyone knew who
had high past exposures, and there was dismay but no surprise when a
dusted worker got lung cancer. In the early 1960s, however, a new
disease called mesothelioma struck several people who were not red
cases. It was hard enough for people to get used to the progressive
nature of asbestos-related diseases and learn to live with the
possibility of permanent disability or death. Mesothelioma, a cancer of
the lung or stomach lining, was a new and even more insidious threat. It
came without warning; it sometimes occurred in people whose asbestos
exposure had been minimal; and it was swift, untreatable, excruciating,
and invariably fatal.
In the 1960s came a new disease, and it was swift, untreatable, excruciating, and invariably fatal.
Deaths
had already begun to occur in the workforce by the time I arrived in
Waukegan, and I came to be a regular visitor at Victory Memorial
Hospital. A young man just 25 years old, with a wife and children, died
of mesothelioma. Others developed lung cancer. I got to know the doctor
who treated most of these cases, and I started borrowing his medical
journals and read dozens of articles on the subject. I began paying more
and more attention to dust collection and abatement, hoping to bring
Waukegan up to the standard of more modern plants. I pushed
dust-reduction programs, and I organized a cleanup of inaccessible
ledges and hard-to-reach beams and sills to reduce the levels of
background dust. I even started wearing my own respirator in
high-exposure areas, though, like everyone else, I was not nearly
skeptical enough about the levels then considered “safe.”
One
memory still haunts me. Early one morning, I stopped at the hospital to
see one of our lathe operators with mesothelioma only to be told that
he had died a few hours before. The family was upstairs, and my heart
was pounding as I walked into the room, acutely aware of my role as
representative of the management system responsible for this premature
death. The man’s wife had known for months that this day was coming, but
the finality of death and the uncertainty of the future were written
all over her face. Her young son stared solemnly at her and then at me. I
managed a few words of thin comfort, but I still remember the woman’s
face and my own feeling of helplessness.
A
few days later, I learned that another plant in the Waukegan complex
was going to close for good, and that set me up for another stark
realization: our workers lived with two quite different kinds of fear.
The announcement was set for 11:30 a.m.,
and I arrived early. Clearly, the word was out. Groups of employees
stood around talking, and I headed for the conference room as quickly as
I could. Turning to go up the stairs, I found a man old enough to be my
father sitting by himself with tears streaming down his cheeks. His
face too came to haunt me over the years. People might dread the
possibility of lung cancer or mesothelioma, but they also dreaded the
possibility of losing the very jobs that put them at risk. And it was my
responsibility to protect them from either outcome.
Workers lived in fear of disease—and of losing the jobs that put them at risk.
As
this realization sank in, however, I began to see that these two
responsibilities did not have to be at odds with each other. On the
contrary, they were closely related, just like my two business goals.
My
primary business mission in Waukegan was to improve plant
profitability; my secondary objective was to gain union cooperation and
support. Since people rarely do their best work for an employer who
neglects their welfare, an improvement of environmental conditions was
clearly essential to achieving either end. This seems like common sense
today, but it was not accepted wisdom in the late 1960s.
Labor
relations, productivity, dust abatement, profitability, health and
safety—it struck me that at some level these were all the same issue. If
there was anything at all I really wanted to know about the plant, the
answer was always somewhere on the shop floor—perhaps not in one place
or with one individual or in sophisticated technical terms, but there
nonetheless. By getting to know more of the workers and more about their
work, I realized that key operating indicators like downtime, material
usage, quality, and productivity were as much a function of attitudes as
they were of mechanics. I remembered what I’d been told about
recalcitrant unions, and I suddenly saw that we had the labor relations
we deserved.
Another piece of conventional thinking that plagued the Waukegan pipe plant was the whole question of maintenance.
Despite
its early neglect of the problem, Manville had become a pioneer in
industrial dust collection by the late 1940s. It had developed what were
in effect gigantic vacuum cleaners with hundreds of dust filters and
dozens of dust lines reaching out to dust hoods on every machine in
virtually every corner of the plant. When profits got tight,
unfortunately, Waukegan managers began to defer maintenance, and, in the
early days, I took the same dead-end approach. Instead of replacing a
damaged dust line, we mended it with duct tape. Instead of replacing or
rebuilding a dust collector, we sent mechanics to shovel their way in
every weekend and jerry-rig repairs. Soon we were spending most of our
time retaping the tape and repairing the repairs, which put the
maintenance curve out in front of us to stay. I watched us repeat the
same repairs over and over again when the only real problem was the lack
of proper repairs to begin with.
For
more than a year, I was captive to the conventional notion that
equipment that doesn’t make a product makes no contribution to profit,
but slowly I changed my mind. First, I saw that a cleaner plant would
function more smoothly and help to reduce downtime. Then, as the morale
and productivity benefits of a better plant environment became more and
more apparent, I became a convert to the idea of cleanliness for its own
sake. Finally, early one Sunday morning toward the end of my second
year, the plant engineer and the production superintendent called me in
to examine a massive breakdown. It was clear to all three of us that we
couldn’t go on the way we had, and pretty soon we were walking through
the plant with a pad of paper, making a long list of everything that
needed fixing. The list included a massive general cleanup.
We
had already taken steps to reduce airborne fiber levels and clear away
the accumulated dust of decades, but there was much still to do. The
plan called for large investments in maintenance and dust-collecting
capacity as well as dozens of practical improvements. We described in
detail all the environmental improvements we required and presented our
analysis to the division staff in Manville, New Jersey. They offered
practical suggestions, private advice that I not try to do everything at
once, and the cynical prediction that if I were foolish enough to
present the plan to top management, I’d get tossed out on my ear.
In
fact, top management knew more than middle management about the
importance of environmental quality. At my next semi-annual meeting with
chairman and CEO Clinton Burnett and members of his staff, I conducted a
tour of the plant and then laid out my plan, complete with charts and
drawings. Or at least I started to. Before I had finished, Burnett
interrupted to ask how much the whole thing was going to cost. With only
the tiniest catch in my voice, I told him half a million dollars.
“Fine,” he said, turning to his staff. “Does anyone have a problem with
that?”
With
our capital expenditures approved, we proceeded to rebuild, replace,
clean, or otherwise refurbish nearly everything in the building. We made
big improvements and thousands of small ones. We installed experimental
cardboard dust hoods to test for effective configurations before
fabricating permanent hoods of metal. We repaired our dust collectors
thoroughly and properly, and we installed air locks and built stairs in
place of ladders.
We cleaned or replaced everything in the building, and as dust counts fell, productivity began to rise.
As
dust counts fell, so did our costs. We had probably made not a single
change that someone hadn’t thought of years earlier; the difference was
that now we were actually making them. As a result, people began to
identify other problems and fix them. The plant’s productivity rose.
People seemed to care more than they had before.
But
even as we turned the corner on productivity and began to win our own
small battle to save Waukegan from closing, the war as a whole was
already lost. Negative public perception of asbestos was growing, and
the market was beginning to crumble. By the late 1970s, asbestos plants
were closing down right and left. In 1982, Manville filed for Chapter 11
reorganization, which was finally granted in 1988.
Our
ultimate acknowledgment of the asbestos problem in the 1980s, which
even then was grudging and halfhearted in some parts of the company, had
come 50 years too late. During the 1970s and 1980s, I had to say
good-bye to every member of my Waukegan administrative staff. They had
become my friends, and now, one by one, they contracted mesothelioma and
died.
In
retrospect, it seems self-evident that clean air and a clean
environment should have top priority in asbestos plants, especially in
plants where some workers have already fallen ill and even died from
asbestos-related diseases. But all through the decades of the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, managers skirted many of the real issues and gave
surprisingly short shrift to others. Denial is itself an insidious
disease. Once given a toehold, it finds its way into management acts and
decisions at every level.
For
example, it was common practice in Waukegan to test for dust under the
best possible circumstances to make the plant look good on paper. It
took a lecture by a medical expert at a plant managers’ meeting to make
me see that the only way to monitor dust emissions meaningfully was to
test our dirtiest products and equipment under the worst conditions, which is exactly what we began to do in about 1970, when we implemented our grand environmental plan.
Another
thing I often saw people do was hide behind procedures and standards
when common sense would have served them better as a guide. I remember
writing a request for funds to repair a dust hood on a coupling lathe
and having one of my engineers attach a report stating that he had
tested the area and found dust levels within company guidelines. There
was nothing wrong
with his report. Procedurally it was quite correct. But just to make
sure my request would be approved, I took his pen and wrote on the
report that I could see dust in the area.
If
an organization’s culture encourages denial, problems get buried.
Corporate cultures are built by successful people, good men and women
who are often pillars of their communities as well as business leaders.
The executives at Manville were good people too, and nevertheless they
fostered a culture of self-deception and denial. Consider all the
various forms this took:
First
was the conviction that asbestos was inherently useful, necessary, and
therefore “good.” I remember hearing colleagues argue that the world
could never get along without it; substitutes were not economically
viable and never would be. Today 18 asbestos companies have filed for
bankruptcy, asbestos is effectively eliminated from commerce, and
asbestos-free substitutes exist for every former use.
Another
powerful form of denial was the conviction that we were already doing
everything possible to reduce risk. Manville acknowledged that the
product was potentially harmful but insisted that employees, unions,
customers, regulators, scientists, and insurance companies all knew of
the dangers. Furthermore, we had modern dust-collection equipment and a
standard for airborne fibers that bettered the national standard at the
time by half. We also issued regular bulletins about acceptable
procedures and exposure levels. What more could we possibly do?
I
have already shown how that attitude led to a pernicious form of
self-deception in some older facilities like Waukegan, where cost
consciousness or an individual manager’s failure to think ahead led to
ineffective dust abatement. But even at the new plants, where
state-of-the-art equipment really did keep dust to a minimum, we might
have asked whether our airborne-fiber standards were really adequate.
True, in the late 1960s, the allowable limit set by the American
Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists was 12 fibers per cubic
centimeter and Manville’s was 6. But did we know that number was low
enough? Were we funding research to find out? The answer is no. By 1972,
OSHA had set its standard at 5 fibers per cc and then lowered it to 2
in 1976. By 1986, even 2 had been reduced 90% to an allowable level of 0.2 fibers per cc.
Worse
yet, while environmental standards in most Manville plants were perhaps
low enough to protect our own workers, there was a big additional
health problem farther downstream in fabricating shops and among people
installing asbestos products like brake shoes.
A
third form of denial was the tendency to believe that the fault lay
elsewhere. During World War II, for example, the U.S. government
controlled the use and applications of asbestos as a strategic and
critical war material. Surely the government should bear some
responsibility for the ensuing problems. The government eventually
escaped responsibility by claiming “sovereign immunity,” but that claim
might have failed if Manville had assumed more responsibility at the
time—during the war—and tried to persuade the shipyards to improve
working conditions. Protests might not have solved the problem—with
ships burning and sinking almost daily, those in charge clearly put
production ahead of potential long-term health hazards—but a paper trail
of responsible warnings could have saved the company by involving the
government in subsequent product liability claims.
Another
potential scapegoat was tobacco. In 1979, a study revealed that
asbestos workers who smoked suffered 50 times more asbestos-related lung
cancer than those who did not. Surely the tobacco industry too should
share responsibility. Ironically, the cigarette manufacturers found
refuge in the government-mandated warning labels that have served them
as a defense against product liability claims.
A
fourth form of denial derives from the very nature of corporations.
Companies exist to go on existing, and corporate existence is a matter
of monthly and quarterly goals. Manville managers never knowingly took
any action that placed their customers or stockholders at risk over the
short term. The long-term consequences of their actions were another
matter.
Finally,
there is a form of denial called “Don’t tell me what I don’t want to
hear.” Early in my career, my boss chided me because I strongly
disagreed with him on some issue. “Bill, you’re not loyal,” he said. And
I said, rightly, I think, “No, no, you’ve got it wrong. I’m the one who
is loyal.”
Every
CEO needs to remember that what he or she knows is only a small part of
the legal equation. Today’s legal standard also convicts people for
what they should have known. Manville did not violate the written law, but juries found that the company did violate the public trust. Caveat vendor has replaced caveat emptor in the courts.
Manville did not violate the written law, but it did violate the public trust.
In
1972, I left Waukegan for Manville’s Denver headquarters to manage all
Manville pipe production; in 1974, I became general manager of the
industrial products division; and in 1978, I was appointed vice
president for production and engineering. Then, in 1981, I took charge
of the Fiber Glass Manufacturing Division. Predictably, I encountered
dozens of large and small production headaches, but after years of
dealing with health issues in the asbestos business, it was a joy to
tackle normal business problems again.
Fiberglass
was by then the leading profit producer in the company. Although widely
seen as an alternative to asbestos, fiberglass is, in fact, only a
partial substitute. Like asbestos, fiberglass will not burn, but it will
melt at high enough temperatures. Like asbestos, fiberglass is an
excellent insulator, but it will not stand up to the intense wear and
other demanding applications that gave asbestos such industrial value.
Fiberglass
differed from asbestos in another critical respect as well. Despite
more than 40 years of scientific studies, there was little evidence
connecting fiberglass to anything more serious than irritation from
prolonged exposure. Most recently, in the early 1980s, a government
laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, had carried out an inhalation
study using laboratory animals, which gave fiberglass a completely clean
bill of health. Even lung irritation from the high experimental dosages
appeared to be completely reversible once the animal was removed from
the exposure. After more than 20 years with asbestos, I was now dealing
with a truly benign substance.
Of
course, we were taking no chances. The environmental controls in our
fiberglass plants were well maintained and extremely effective, and
workplace monitoring was routine. The product also carried a warning
label about the potential for irritation.
During
the early 1980s, Manville consolidated fiberglass marketing and
manufacturing into a single Fiber Glass Group, and I became group
president. Encouraged by Dr. Bob Anderson, who was Manville’s corporate
medical director, I became a strong proponent of aggressive scientific
research.
In
October 1986, Bob was in Copenhagen attending a symposium on man-made
mineral fibers chaired by Sir Richard Doll, a world-renowned
epidemiologist. The conference was uneventful until its last few
moments. In his concluding remarks, Doll summarized the most important
presentations and then ended with this comment: “If I now abandon the
firm basis of scientific judgment…I do so because I know that, in the
absence of such a conclusion, many people may think that the whole
symposium has been a waste of time. Let me therefore add…accepting that
[fiberglass and other man-made mineral fibers] are not more carcinogenic
than asbestos fibers, we can conclude that exposure to fiber levels of
the order of 0.2 respirable fibers per [cubic centimeter] is unlikely to
produce a measurable risk even after another 20 years have passed.”
Confirming
the fact that low exposure to man-made mineral fibers would not produce
measurable risk was not news, and exposures, especially in fiberglass,
were extremely low. But 0.2 was the asbestos standard. What Doll had done was to establish a link between a known carcinogen and fiberglass!
Bob
called me immediately, and the first words out of his mouth were,
“Bill, our lives may have just changed forever.” We both knew from
experience that once a public perception is created, changing it can be
extremely difficult. I hung up the phone and thought, I don’t deserve
two of these in one lifetime.
With fiberglass linked to a known carcinogen, I hung up the phone and thought, “I don’t deserve two of these in one lifetime.”
The
best scientific and health information available indicated to us that
fiberglass posed little if any risk to workers or users. But wasn’t it
possible that Manville executives reached the same conclusion about
asbestos in the 1930s? I leaned back in my chair, ran through all the
perceived failings of the asbestos industry in my head, and compared
them to the situation we were now facing with fiberglass.
Had
we done enough scientific research? Were our environmental controls and
conditions the best in the world? Had workplace monitoring given us an
accurate assessment of risk for factory workers as well as fabricators
and installers? Had our audits found all the environmental and safety
problems? And were we fixing these problems as soon as we found them?
I
kicked myself mentally on realizing that our score wasn’t an A+ but,
unfortunately, more like a B. If anyone should have known better, it was
I. But at least there was no question about what we had to do now.
First and foremost, we were going to communicate.
Manville’s
new president, Tom Stephens, was well schooled in the roots of the
asbestos tragedy. Like me, he had learned more than a little about
corporate denial and more than a lot about corporate responsibility.
Within hours, we had posted Doll’s remarks on all plant bulletin boards
and begun the process of communicating with all our customers, first by
phone and then in person. This was the first move in a communications
campaign that continued for years, to the mystification of many. From
the start, for example, our fiberglass competitors criticized us for not
thinking through what they called the “probable impact of our actions.”
But we did think them through. Our competitors did not understand the
history of asbestos.
Doll’s
remarks were only the first of many challenges. In June 1987, the
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) met in France,
debated human and animal scientific studies separately, and concluded
that the human evidence was not sufficient to consider fiberglass a
possible cause of lung cancer. But on the basis of animal implantation
work—glass fibers that were surgically implanted directly into the body
cavities of laboratory rats—and over the protests of scientists who felt
that inhalation tests were more accurate predictors of a potential
hazard, the IARC classified fiberglass wool as “possibly carcinogenic to
humans.”
The
IARC cautions that its findings are not to be considered assessments of
risk, but the difference between hazard and risk is often confusing.
Hazard defines the potential to produce harm; risk reflects the
probability that this hazard will be realized. For example, radiation is
hazardous, but when your dentist covers you with a lead shield and
takes low-dosage X rays, there is little if any risk. The IARC is
chartered to assess hazard only. By U.S. law, however, IARC findings
automatically trigger a lot of state and federal product-safety
regulations, and the trigger goes off without any risk assessment.
Moreover, the regulations require companies to communicate the hazard,
not the risk. Outside of scientific circles, these rules create a great
deal of confusion.
In
October 1987, the International Program on Chemical Safety (IPCS) of
the World Health Organization declared that animal-inhalation studies
were the most relevant way of assessing potential hazards to human
beings. That finding agreed with our own convictions on the subject, but
it would take several years to complete new studies and several more
for the IARC to consider the new evidence.
We
included the IARC finding in our product literature and added a
“possible cause of cancer” warning label on all fiberglass-wool
products.
“I
will tell you the truth,” I told all our customers, “and if I don’t
know, I will tell you I don’t know, along with what I am doing to find
out.” Put very simply, our communications policy was, “You’ll know when
we know.” We gave regular briefings on fiberglass safety and health to
customers, employees, union officials, community leaders, and regulatory
agencies by phone, letter, brochure, videotape, live television, and
group meetings.
If
there wasn’t one crisis, there were three. We finally realized that
truth, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. Regulatory agencies,
the media, nonfiberglass competitors, and the fiberglass industry—all
interpreted the truth to serve themselves. At the time, I didn’t
understand this aspect of the problem, and it led to conflict and
frustration. Take the regulatory agencies:
The
IPCS conclusion that inhalation was the preferred method for assessing a
potential hazard led the fiberglass industry to fund a new inhalation
study. We assembled a panel of independent scientists in Denver, and for
two days they hammered out a protocol to achieve the highest possible
scientific standard for the study. Then we signed a contract with a
laboratory in Geneva, the only one in the world that met the panel’s
quality standards.
We
sent the protocols to the appropriate regulatory bodies in advance of
the study and routinely briefed them on its progress. After two years,
the tests concluded with entirely negative results—no evidence that respirated fiberglass fibers affected the rate of lung cancer in laboratory rats. We were elated.
But
the regulatory agencies did not find the results as conclusive as we
did. Scientific conclusions are based on assumptions—change the
assumptions, and you get a different conclusion—and the protocols and
assumptions of this study were industry’s, not OSHA’s or the EPA’s. The
scientists who consulted for us had designed an extensive
chronic-inhalation study using state-of-the-art inhalation technology.
We knew that a positive finding would establish fiberglass as a
hazardous substance, and while we didn’t expect that outcome, we were
prepared for the possibility. We were not prepared for the regulators’
response to a negative finding, which seemed merely to arouse their
automatic skepticism about industry intentions. They seemed to feel that
a study that found no hazard in the product could not, by definition,
be “most protective” of society.
It
taught us that we should have involved the regulators in the
formulation of assumptions and protocols. A negative finding that was
based on their own assumptions would have been more difficult for them
to pick apart.
The
media presented another challenge. When the inhalation study came in
with negative results, we declared victory in our internal publications
and wanted the media to do the same. We continuously presented our view
of truth to the press by explaining the IARC’s hazard-assessment
process, the difference between hazard and risk, the physical
differences between asbestos and fiberglass, and our conviction that
fiberglass posed little if any risk to workers. But reporters are even
more suspicious than regulators. By adding our own side of the story to
every disclosure, we managed to convince them they were getting less
than the whole truth. As a result, they grasped at any source of
negative information or simply reminded their readers of the IARC’s
original classification. We got headlines like, “Evidence Grows on
Possible Link of Fiberglass and Lung Illness” or “Could Fiberglass
Become the Asbestos of the 1990s?” The lesson that taught me was never
to give in to pressure to try to make ourselves look good in risk
communications. Let public relations do that work for itself. In risk
communications, stick to the facts.
Reporters were even more skeptical than regulators and grasped at every shred of negative information.
Nonfiberglass
competitors were yet another problem. Our candid communication policy
delighted many of them. The more we disclosed, the more information they
had to twist and distort with customers. The issue also gave them an
umbrella to put some new competitive products on the market (none of
which, by the way, were subjected to hazard or risk assessment). We had
to use legal means to stop the most blatant distortions, and most
attempts to sensationalize the issue backfired. Our best weapon was our
communication policy itself, because most customers understood that we
were telling them everything we knew.
We
learned that truth is relative, but we also learned that a consistent,
conscientious commitment to the truth is a weapon powerful enough to
overcome relativity, cynicism, and a great deal of fear. Driven by
business as well as liability concerns, our customers wanted us to keep
them up-to-date, and that was a perfect fit with our
you’ll-know-when-we-know policy. As customers began to depend on us for
the latest news on fiberglass and health, relationships steadily
improved, and I started receiving letters from customers supporting our
actions. Our policy was so effective that its critics changed their tune
from “You are going to destroy the industry” to “You must be doing this
to gain competitive advantage.”
Our you’ll-know-when-we-know policy overcame cynicism, doubt, and fear.
Through
all the turmoil and adverse publicity, fiberglass has remained the
preferred material for residential insulation and has retained or
improved its market position in the industrial, commercial, filtration,
and aerospace segments. In fact, 1993 was one of the best sales years in
the history of the fiberglass-wool industry.
In
its product liability defense, the asbestos industry argued that it did
not violate the law. The law required no warnings; a supplier’s
liability was limited to simple negligence. Moreover, the medical data
were not conclusive until the 1960s. While technically correct, this
defense was tied to the legalities of the past, and in the mid-1970s,
with the benefit of hindsight, juries began to make judgments on the
basis of what companies should have done, should have known, and should
have disclosed. Increasingly, they judged the asbestos industry guilty
of not meeting this new, higher, retroactive standard and required it to
pay punitive damages for its failure to do so.
When
I learned to fly an airplane on instruments, I was taught that my
senses were always wrong and that the instruments were always right. As
managers, our senses are finely tuned to deal with short-term changes
and seldom help us with the blind landings that are still years away.
When the pressure to cut short-term costs is high, it simply goes
against the grain to increase spending for environmental controls with
an uncertain long-term pay-back. What I learned as a businessman in the
asbestos and fiberglass industries was that the instruments of long-term
guidance are called principles. More specifically, they’re called
responsibility and product stewardship.
Product
stewardship—defined as product responsibility extending through the
entire stream of commerce, from raw material extraction to the ultimate
disposal of a used-up or worn-out product—can cost a lot of money. But
so can the alternative. Moreover, product stewardship probably
represents the legal standard of tomorrow. Environmental regulations
grow steadily tougher, and the imputed knowledge from these regulations
will almost certainly carry over into the area of product liability.
I
cannot possibly say how many companies are putting themselves and their
employees and customers at this kind of risk today. I think I do know
that voluntary product stewardship adds up to competitive advantage over
the short term and a greatly improved chance of survival and profit
into the future.
1. Beshada v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., 90 N.J. 191, 447 A. 2d 539 (1982).
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