We sat down with Ursa Major's new Chief Safety and Risk Officer to discuss his new role and its anticipated impact on the company's future.
What excites you most about working for Ursa Major?
- The team at Ursa Major and its focused pursuit of this company’s mission are what drive my excitement with this opportunity. Across all of Ursa Major’s product lines and throughout the company I have found incredibly talented engineers, manufacturing process leaders and business experts focused on solving our customers’ hardest propulsion problems. The singularity of purpose at Ursa Major is clarifying and gets me up in the morning.
Ursa Major’s culture fosters safety and situational awareness – how do you hope to continue or add to this approach?
- Ursa Major’s nine-year record of safety and compliance is truly remarkable when you think about the evolving technologies, unique materials and exacting manufacturing processes that are required for this industry and the innovation Ursa Major is bringing to market. My approach is three-fold. First, Safety and Innovation are not areas where there is trade space and Ursa Major’s leadership understands they go hand-in-hand. Successful innovation relies on a successful safety program. Secondly, Ursa Major is leaning boldly forward to scale the production of superior propulsion products. As a result, we are taking the steps to thoughtfully ensure increases in production will maintain the same safety, quality and reliability assurances. Lastly, Ursa Major continues to explore new technological advances and many of those market entries bring new personnel, manufacturing and environmental hazards. Ursa Major will remain an industry safety leader as we explore these new technologies and continue to solve the most difficult propulsion challenges for our customers
How does increasing investment in safety strengthen efficiency and innovation?
- The entire Ursa Major team recognizes that innovation is a cornerstone of Ursa Major’s success. This leadership team also clearly understands that safety and innovation are entwined in ensuring the company’s continued success. Scaling manufacturing while jointly taking bold steps forward in innovation requires starting with safety as part of our process. For a company like Ursa Major that means creating the environment for them to test and find the limits of what hardware can withstand while being safe. My mandate, as I see it, is creating a culture where mitigating risk is so baked in to the Ursa Major approach that safety does not jeopardize innovation, nor innovation proceed without due regard to safety.
What prompted the Navy to establish the Naval Safety Command, and what lessons from that experience can you bring to Ursa Major?
- Naval Safety Command was established following the tragic fire which severely damaged and ultimately led to the decommissioning of the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6). Naval Safety Command was created to enhance the Navy and Marine Corps safety posture, improve the risk management culture across the enterprise, Leverage AI and Data Analytics to advance predictive modeling and identify accountable persons for the Navy and Marine Corps most difficult safety and risk challenges. The core lessons I took away from my experience were 1/ the safety and risk perspective had to have a seat at the table from the start for an organization to grow and scale effectively and 2/ investing in technology and processes help, but safety has to be part of the culture in order for organizations to thrive. You cannot hand-off the responsibilities of risk and safety to a team and assume they will handle it—rather, that safety and risk perspective has to be imbedded in each team and informed by experts.
