HRCM Book Series: An Author’s Perspective Emery Roe Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley & Co-author of High Reliability Management in the HRCM Series

An Author’s Perspective Q: What is our book, High Reliability Management: Operating on the Edge (2008) about? A: The neglected perspective in policy & management, namely, finding answers to the this very important question. . . --I suspect that many, if not most of you, at this lunchtime presentation are practitioners, who might be wondering what a book series like this can do for you. --Well, I speak to you as one who has been a practicing policy analyst, since I started my career in the early 1970s, but one who has worn a research hat from time to time as well. --In fact, both my colleague, Paul Schulman and I, wrote High Reliability Management so that it could speak to practitioners and researchers alike about what we consider the neglected perspective in actual policy and management and in research about policy and management, a perspective that practitioners know is neglected better than many academic researchers do.

The Neglected Perspective What better practices do frontline professionals use to manage the shortfalls and errors that come with the way policy and technology are currently designed? This question, in turn, has two parts: --What are professionals in major critical infrastructures doing to prevent the built-in accidents and system failures which, if they did happened, would cost billions & billions? --Given more and more of these critical infrastructures are operating on the edge, what are these professionals actually doing when system failure or crisis happens? --We pose the neglected perspective as a particular research question: What better practices do frontline professionals use to manage the shortfalls and errors that come with the way policy and technology are currently designed? --This question in turn has two parts: **What are professionals in our major critical infrastructures doing everyday to prevent the built-in accidents and system failures which, if they did happened, would cost us billions and billions? **Given more and more of these critical infrastructures are operating on the edge, what are these very same professionals actually doing once failure or catastrophe happens because of outside factors, such as drastic budget cuts or human catastrophes? --I want to stress that identifying these better practices, where they exist, and how they evolve and change over time will require a great deal more research.

An Author’s Perspective The Importance of the Stanford University Press Series on High Reliability and Crisis Management to authors: --Editorial coherence so the titles fit together --Titles marketed together for longer impact --…and more! --So I can’t say that Paul and I have all the answers, but the fact that we have some and have made a start on the others is due to our great good fortune of the Stanford University Press Series in High Reliability and Crisis Management. It’s a great venue for the kinds of issues that Paul and our colleagues are interested in. --In addition to the points already mentioned by Margo and Ranja I’d like to stress what Paul and I found to be important about the Series, namely, the fact that it is a series means there is an overarching editorial coherence with respect to the titles fitting together and that all the titles are in practice marketed together, which in turn means that readers can discover older titles as newer ones in the series appear. --From an author’s perspective a series keeps one’s own book in the public consciousness for a longer period and gives it a longer period for impact. --in addition, we had great copy editing and we found the Series’ encouragement to create our own website to market and extend the book to be right on. --With that, I’d like to turn it over to Tim Vogus…