Plenty of good speeches and words of wisdom at the ICS/ISF conference in London in September, one of which our chairman was able to make shameless use of as he went off to a meeting immediately after.
The words of wisdom were from one of the non shipping speakers – namely Paul Clow of DuPont with an excellent slide on how people in companies who have successfully produced a ‘culture’ work together and support each other. His particular focus was on safety cultures, but his talk had much to offer for all aspects of corporate culture.
Needless to say our chairman was most grateful and able to look much more knowledgeable than he really was at a meeting with a client responsible for safety in a global mining group not one hour later. Thanks Paul!
For anyone with a safety brief in their business, you could do worse than to check out their website at http://www2.dupont.com/Sustainable_Solutions/en_US/knowl_center/safety_resources.html.
More words of wisdom came from Professor Tim Carter of the Norwegian Centre for Maritime Medicine who said that while traditional owners with their own ships cared for seafarers for their whole life, single contract employment and short term thinking didn’t help. Food is also a key issue as Professor Ralph Becker-Heins of Marine Serve pointed out in discussing the Seachefs project. We were impressed to see that there are people out there making sure that the kind of food served on ships does not come back to bite seafarers in later life. And there was an an inspiring presentation by Brian Ingpen , head of the Lawhill Maritime Centre in South Africa who showed just how successful training young disadvantaged people for a career at sea could be.
Great stuff actually – get yourself along next year!
