To “believe,” by definition, is to accept that something is true, especially without proof. The key words for “belief” include trust, confidence, honesty, etc. In contrast, “make believe” is the action of pretending or imagining that things are better than they really are. Key words for “make believe” include pretend, illusion, delusion, self-deception, and such.
While an established company like Sony can afford to have the tagline “Make believe,” perhaps it is not the right message we may wish to send to our commercial partners in textile, RMG, leather, shoes, jute, and other trades.
I have been working in safety, insurance, and risk management for the past 20 years, where, by definition, “optimism” is an occupational hazard. But from what I have seen over the past year or so, I believe that the Bangladesh textile, RMG, and shoe industry are at a fantastic juncture between “make believe” and “believe.”
We are at the crossroads where one direction will lead us to excellence, confidence, and belief, and the other that will continue down the path of make believe only. Even a skeptic like me is now optimistic that we are headed towards the path of excellence.
Let’s talk a little bit more about believe and make believe. Over the past decade, working as a risk management consultant for a multinational company in Bangladesh, I have visited hundreds of factories -- from textile mills, readymade garment factories, power plants, to mobile switch sites and tanneries. I am privileged to have seen both the best and the worst over these years. I have been to factories where I struggled to find faults, or to make recommendations for risk improvement.
Those were proud moments in my career. But those were also rare moments. Unfortunately, mostly of what I had encountered in the past were the “make” believers. From empty fire-water reservoirs, missing or leaking fire hose pipes, to toy fire extinguishers -- I’ve seen them all. I have seen “Safety First” slogans posted in almost all the worst possible factories, convincing me that safety was in fact the last. A simple giveaway is that, the slogan is written in English while 80% of the workers can’t read English, leading me to believe that the slogan is in fact meant for the eyes of the foreign buyers.
It made me think about why they were so busy make-believing. I wondered who they were trying to fool. The passage of time surely answered -- none, but themselves. Perhaps they never heard the bob Marley song, in which he sang: “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time ...”
I realise that a key component for building a safety culture was missing in Bangladesh -- that is, caring for our own people.
Safety is a part of the pure risk management process. Risk management is the “identification, measurement, financing, and control of risks which threaten the existence, assets, earnings, or people of an organisation.” We were doing everything to please our buyers, but without a care for our own people. What is a culture without its people? How can safety culture mean anything if it doesn’t include people first and foremost?
I have been to several plants where personal protective equipment (PPE) were either not provided by the factory owners, or are not being used by the workers. In several occasions, I found fabric autocad cutters being used without mesh gloves. Sure, working with a mesh glove is difficult to get used to. But the operators are oblivious of the fact that, without a thumb, s/he is likely never to get a job again.
When pointed out to the supervisor, an example against the misdemeanor was showcased to me by a hard slap in the face of the operator. Who was he trying to impress? It is only because of him, and his failure to train and implement personnel-safety, that the operator doesn’t wear personal protective equipment. If anything, he is the one deserving of a slap.
A building collapses. Approximately 1,200 people die. We blame the buyers! Yes, the buyers are squeezing the prices. Totally unfair! But who made the building? Who works in these damned buildings -- your buyers or your own people? If you don’t care for your own people, how can you expect them to care?
I have many clients telling me all about “compliance” every time I raise the issue of safety. In my opinion, we spend way too much time worrying about compliance. Here’s why: What is “compliance”? In simple terms, compliance is the mandate for acceptable business trade. In the textile and RMG sector, it is buyer-driven. And so, it is more about the buyers’ mandate rather than the sellers’.
Today, you have a good, compliant factory. Your buyers are happy, your buyers are with you. But tomorrow, when your factory burns down, they say “thank you Mr Khan. It was a pleasure doing business with you for the past 15 years. No hard feelings, but we need our orders delivered.” They shake your hand, and off they go. “Well Hello Mr Chowdhury. What a fine new factory you have built next to Mr Khan’s!”
We need to look at our business from a business interruption point of view. Our objective should be to make sure that there will not be any kind of business interruption due to safety lapses, that includes proper inspection and maintenance of all our equipment first and foremost so that they don’t harm or hurt our workers.
We are a very curious people. One person gets hurt, 20 people gather around to see what happened. Even if for a brief moment -- your business is interrupted. In risk management, we call it Incident or near miss reporting. If you can identify and prevent safety lapses before the incident, or decrease the number of small incidents, you have a better chance of saving your factory from the big accidents. And that can only happen if you implement proper risk management systems with zero tolerance for safety lapses -- not because the buyer said so – but because you don’t want business interruption.
There has been a positive change blowing over the past three years or so -- even before the Rana Plaza incident. Many of the farsighted and progressive manufacturers in Bangladesh had been riding this positive change for a long time now. I have had the good fortune of visiting their factories; to have felt nothing but pride. Against the backdrop of all the bad press and negativity surrounding them, these factories have been working hard to set themselves apart as an example of truth, confidence, and honesty. They have seen the light. They “believe.”
A couple of months ago, I was speaking to a Lloyd’s underwriter in London about the current state of affairs, vis-à-vis safety, in Bangladesh. I told him -- with Alliance, Accord, and the rest of the world looking at Bangladesh with their critical eyes -- in about five years, the Bangladesh textile, garment, shoe manufacturing, and associated industries will exhibit higher safety standards compared to the rest of the world.
But to make that happen and truly believe in that, we need to: a) Build a people-centric safety culture, (2) look at safety from a business interruption point of view, and (3) implement holistic safety management programs based on risk management principles. If we can do this, it will take care of the buyers’ compliance requirements automatically.
When I first began writing this article, I had put the header “quality never goes out of style.” In the end I changed it, because the buyers are already here. They are here because of the quality we are able to deliver. What is missing in the equation is excellence. Once my brothers and sisters from Bangladesh can deliver excellence, we won’t have to chase after the buyers. They will chase after us.
Styles may change, trends may differ, but Excellence never goes out of style.