Episode Transcript
The police yell for motorists to get moving is a huge wall of smoke and flames.
00:05
Homes destroyed after a huge explosion last night.
00:07
It was apparently caused by a broken gas.
00:19
So before we get into the Failure File series where we're coming back nearly two years later, I want to set the stage for you guys because I have objectives and what we want to do.
00:29
My objective here, this is there's two ways that you can approach failures.
00:32
You can, you can look at a lot of the failures that we're going to talk about and you can say that wouldn't have been me.
00:38
The other way is you can look at it and you can see yourself in the conversations and in the issues that happened.
00:44
So we're going to be talking about things like the Macondo BP oil spill, Type A sleeves, Challenger Geo hazards in our industry again.
00:55
We're going to talk about Boeing.
00:56
That's one that most of you guys will have heard about and maybe even some third-party damage.
01:01
And the best example I can make of you of this for you guys, why this is so impactful to me is, for instance, in the Challenger episode, Challenger is probably covered more in my professional engineering degree at Texas A&M than anything else I had heard about.
01:22
Like I heard about it to the point where I actually got tired of it and.
01:25
Because we had these ethics courses and they would always bring up the O-rings.
01:28
And as I'm listening, I'm like, I don't understand why this is so difficult.
01:32
Like just make the right freaking engineering decision and be done.
01:36
I think as a as a 1718 nineteen year old in college, that's one way to look at it.
01:41
Years later when I read that story and I read the conversations, I see myself in the characters because we don't, we don't deal in this in an industry that's free of economic or other considerations.
01:53
We want to feed our families.
01:54
We want to stay employed.
01:56
That influences the decisions we make.
01:58
We work for companies that are for profit.
02:00
Like it or not, the profit motive is directly at odds, unfortunately, sometimes with short-term integrity decisions.
02:10
And those are the real things that we have to deal with.
02:13
So as we go through this series, my ask of you as an audience is listen and don't just say, oh, that's not for me.
02:19
Listen and find yourself in this story.
02:21
Put yourself in the boots of the BP company man that's faced with peer pressure from other people around him.
02:31
Put yourself in the room of a VP that's making a decision that might have economic considerations for his entire team and shut down large portions of his company if he feels that he makes a certain decision.
02:45
And then the stories become real to you and the lessons become real to you.
02:49
If you do that, I think you're really going to enjoy this series because again, I personally enjoyed it and I enjoy bringing it to you.
02:55
So thanks for your support and thanks for listening to this series and this season of The Failure Files.
03:00
It's good to be back on Pipeline Things.
