The day Wall Street heard about deaths

October 1987, Wall Street, New York, the financial cradle of the world. This is where one of the most well-known stories of transformational leadership in safety begins. I'm talking about Paul O'Neill, of course. A few blocks from here, in October of '87, he held a meeting that would change forever not only the history of Alcoa but the history of what it means to lead in safety.

At that meeting where he was introduced as the new CEO of the company, the expectations of participants, shareholders, investors, and all the financial market journalists were that he would talk about productivity, share value, possible share buybacks, expectations for the aluminum market. But in that meeting he began with a single topic. "My priority is to talk about the safety of our workers."

And at the top of my list was safety. The goal is that people who work at Alcoa never get hurt at work. Our goal will be zero. Paul O'Neill believed that when a company has accident-free management, its other management systems will also be healthy. And he wanted to demonstrate that. However, in that meeting some shareholders, investors, and journalists still raised their hands trying to steer the meeting toward financial questions about profit and shares.

And he kept coming back to his point: "I think you didn't understand. I want to talk about safety." Even the safety director was surprised by the goal of zero accidents. His aim was to put into practice what many companies were saying in theory: "our main asset is our worker." Let's demonstrate that. Let's put it into practice. If people really are the most important resource of an organization, the company has to make sure they never get hurt at work.

And there he realized that his message at that moment, taking over as CEO of Alcoa, was not directed only at the financial market. He was sending a message to the managers, to his entire operational front line. He was saying that the value of life was something they would not tolerate and certainly not let pass: exposure to risk.

He believed that all risks should be eliminated or well managed, but never tolerated and left behind with complacency. And there begins the trajectory of Paul O'Neill. This impactful message marked the history of Wall Street. But from then on the journey was hard. Why? Because some investors did decide to sell their shares. They understood that the company's focus at that moment would not be financial. Holding their shares looked like a risky investment.

Others decided to stay. And those who stayed managed to glimpse something deeply transformative. But I want to bring up a point that draws attention. What was Alcoa's safety context at that time? We're not talking about a company with poor safety performance. We're talking about a company that operated in 46 countries and had a lost-workday injury rate of 1.86. Over 13 years leading Alcoa, Paul O'Neill managed to bring that number down to 0.0126.

What is that? How do you make that journey? And as I said, it wasn't easy. All his determination was tested. Three months after that impactful announcement here on Wall Street, the undesired happened. After being there about 3 months, there was an incident in a plant on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. It was a night shift. An 18-year-old who had been working at the company for about three weeks jumped over a protective barrier that was nearly as tall as this.

It wasn't solid, but it was a high barrier between him and the machine. And this specific machine had a rotating arm. The machine was prone to jamming and the aluminum material would get stuck, trapped. And this young man jumped over the barrier and pulled the excess material from the moving part of the machine, and that released the arm. It rotated, struck his head, killed him instantly.

Two supervisors who had been there for 15 or 20 years watched as he did it. In fact, they must have taught him to do it, because I don't think he came up with the idea on his own to jump over the barrier and pull the material from the machine. When Paul O'Neill got that call, an attitude worthy of a leader took over the place. He took charge of the analysis, gathered all the managers, the front-line workers. We're going to understand what happened.

And during that analysis, they discovered thousands of situations that needed to improve. And that was the invitation from the very beginning of the message. What are the improvements we need to make? The invitation to a deep review of our operational processes. It's a shame we didn't do it before. That accident marked Paul O'Neill's trajectory. That young man was newly married, and his wife was two months pregnant.

When they identified everything that led to that accident, a message came to the surface. "I gathered the entire executive team down to the plant supervisor level, and we reviewed the diagrams and the machine process and everything else. And when we finished with the technical part, I stood up and said to the group: 'We killed him. Yes, the supervisors were there, but we killed him. I caused his death because I didn't do a good job of communicating dedication to a principle that people should never be hurt at work.'"

And from that moment on, he says many people engage not through pretty stories but through sad ones. From that moment, engagement strengthened and commitment at every level followed. The company reached results never before achieved in the aluminum industry. It showed the world that safety is built through leadership.