This is a simple thought from the National Safety Council.

When you are texting, or changing the radio station, or a million other things you may as well be blind.

You are traveling 60 MPH. A vehicle a football field away is traveling 60 MPH. You are 1 1/2 seconds away from a possible head-on crash.

David Sneed

Safety is the 21st Century Poverty

In 1963, James MacGregor Burns wrote: "Because it has failed to engage itself with the problems that dog us during our working days and haunt our dreams at night, politics has not engaged the best of us, or at least the best in us. If people seem complacent or inert, the cause may lie less in them than in a political system that evades and confuses the real issues rather than sharpening or resolving them."

We find that oil companies are required to have safety plans for offshore drilling. When there was a drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we found that the plan writing was outsourced, no one read it at the oil company, and no one read it at the Minerals Management Service (MMS.) With other disasters we find that newspaper reporters within an hour have determined the cause of the incident. A year or two later OSHA or MSHA confirms that initial report and blames management for failing to prevent the incident. Money changes hands between the business and government and life goes on with no one making any real complaint.

The solutions to so many safety problems are easy but are not done. There is too much money and too many jobs involved in maintaining dysfunction and in responding to incidents.

Hunger is easy to understand. In today's society hunger is mostly a non-issue. Anyone can get food stamps and there are plenty of give-aways. Try offering a meal to a "will work for food" standing at most intersections.

The big issues today involve safety and security. Physiological needs are mostly solved. However, the solutions go beyond simply providing food to the hungry. Often the problems are qualitative and the solutions are complex.

In December of 2011, the compromise solution for the "Jobs Bill," ostensibly to create jobs, was a two month reduction of billions of dollars in contributions to a bankrupt social security fund in exchange for ten years of added fees to new mortgages.

In a campaign time for both parties, the appearance of more take-home pay is more important than grown-up solutions to real problems.

Cowboy Safety is the realization that government is not going to solve safety and security problems and that people, individually, in their own business, and in their own communities need to find a solution.

David Sneed

Law of Misguided Subsidies

T.J. Rodgers, Founder, President and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor has an article in today's Wall Street Journal called "Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels."

In the article he updates the Law of Unintended Consequences with the corollary Law of Misguided Subsidies: "Whenever Washington disrupts a market by dumping subsidies into it, Wall Street will find a way to pocket a majority of the money while the intended subsidy beneficiaries are harmed by the resulting market turmoil."

In the Cowboy Safety approach the safety model aims to allow the intended beneficiaries to get the subsidies and aims to make a path so that harm is not done. To do this requires knowledge and understanding. It also means planning well in advance often at the point of firm formation. Government also plans well in advance and may even design the subsidy program to make it difficult for the intended beneficiaries to achieve any benefit. That is because they may have another agenda or may themselves be victims of The Law of Unintended Consequences. The Cowboy Safety approach is not to take a political position, not to be critical, but to understand, to benefit and to avoid damage.

Cowboy Safety goes beyond the concepts of tax planning that is looking for deduction s and deferrals. Cowboy Safety puts the business into relevant context and synthesis. Most accountants, and I started out as one, are left brain thinkers. Left brain thinkers can analyze but they cannot synthesize. Left brain thinking worked well with industrial age businesses that transformed low level materials into higher level materials. Each step added value. Left brained thinking cannot handle any other business concept. It cannot handle the dimensions of experiential and transformational business that is borderless not just geographically but borderless in concept and in time. Neither can government.

David Sneed