While worker safety is often touted as a company's first priority, more often than not, safety activity is driven by compliance to legislation rather than any safety improvement initiative. This book takes a proactive approach - it is not contingent on legislation. A serious Lean effort will tear apart an old inefficient entitlement-riddled culture and build it into something effective.

It takes lessons learned from Lean and applies them to the building of a world-class safety-first organization. The author focuses the power of Lean improvement on the universal topic of safety. In doing so, he shows how Lean and safety are linked; that the achievement of one is often dependent upon achievement of the other. In this book, the author:

- Challenges each stakeholder to think proactively and accept individual responsibility for safety
- Emphasizes that the building of a top safety program requires the building of a world-class safety culture
- Demonstrates how basic Lean tools are as applicable to safety as they are to Lean, such as the A3 problem-solving process and the facilitated kaizen blitz
- Removes fear from the accident investigation process so that root causes are addressed rather than hidden
- Establishes standards and metrics for safety management that are clearly definable and measurable.