Many years ago, it seems another lifetime almost, I worked in safety for a paper company in the South, and then in New England. Now I am with an insurance carrier in the Atlanta area and, believe me, I’ll never venture north for work again!

The nanotech revolution is predicted to be in full swing by 2015. By then many engineered nanomaterials will have moved out of the research lab and into the marketplace, creating over a $1 trillion global industry and employing more than one million workers in the U.S.

The global competition of today’s business world requires people to work smarter. For this to happen, corporate decision-makers need more input from their employees. For safety performance to improve beyond current plateaus, hourly workers need to provide more advice, involvement, and interpersonal accountability.

With our cover story this month taking a look at the future of industrial hygiene, I thought I’d dust off some predictions I made a dozen years ago and see how they turned out.

Symbolic nonverbal messages are sent out by teams, departments, offices, plants, divisions and organizations. More obvious for safety professionals, think of the immediate impression you have when you see a clean, well-organized maintenance shop as opposed to a cramped, dirty, messy, unorganized one.

I need your help. There’s a clip from an old song playing in my head that “something is happening here, but what it is, is not exactly clear.”

Some business managers are stuck in the past. They believe we are still in the Industrial Age of top-down control. They do not appreciate nor embrace a paradigm shift in the 21st Century, identified by Peter Drucker as the “Age of the Knowledge Worker.”

Almost 20 years ago we ran on the front cover of ISHN a large, close-up photo of a young boy, hard hat tilted on his head, sitting on a construction pile in Beijing, China. That shot came to mind not long ago while I was skimming through a Blockbuster store, of all places.

Times being what they are, with environmental health and safety professional fields fragmented, work more fast-paced, with less time for reading and strategizing, I don’t know if one individual such as Dan Petersen will ever command the collective attention he did for more than half a century.

Does it make you nervous when a stranger knows more about you or your business than you think they should? In today’s information age there are very few secrets. It’s best to anticipate what questions you might have to respond to, coming from sources that might surprise you, and have a plan for communication.