“Zero defects” is a pretty lofty goal, but in our business, zero defects may be the difference between life and death.

It’s just become a norm of our victim society that it’s okay to be self-righteous and it’s okay to go after anyone who doesn’t think like us.

You can speculate, you can imagine, you can insinuate, and you can opinionate, but the long and short of it is that YOU DON’T KNOW.

If the public percieves that your service doesn’t have value, they will cut it back to where they feel it deserves to be funded, plain and simple.

While leaders must have the ability to exercise statesmanship, these soft skills are sometimes not fully appreciated unless you can bring some smackdown to the table.

If this doesn’t illustrate the live-saving capability of residential sprinklers, I don’t know what else to tell you. You can dry things off after they get wet. You can’t unburn your family or your home.

One of the biggest problems the fire service has is its credibility. I received multiple e-mails over the past few weeks about a confined space training near-miss that in reading the information, I found to be pretty troubling.

If you are going to implement change in your organizational culture, there should be a reluctance to be where you were and a desire to go where you are going.

Emergency service delivery is a very specialized business in your unique community. There aren’t too many tenders wandering the streets of Manhattan, and conversely, there aren’t many six-man truck companies in rural Arkansas. Saying one method of delivery is better than the other is ridiculous; they don’t compare.