CEO MONTHLY / Global CEO Excellence Awards 2022 20 Industrial Safety CEO of the Year 2022: Luke Dam Joining the business in 2016, Luke Dam has altered the face of Safety Wise, turning it into an internationally recognisable business. As the company’s CEO, Luke has big ideas for Safety Wise’s future, including its expansion into a number of new territories. afety Wise entered the industry in 2002, and since then, it has established itself as an internationally successful business. Boasting representation in Australia, the USA, South America, Canada, Belgium, and Africa, Safety Wise envisions a future in which it can expand its services throughout Europe and the APAC region, building a larger network of clients. Moreover, the business offers both workplace accident investigative and training services, and in 20 years of business it has conducted 795 investigations and worked with 110,000 people in regard to investigation training. The business utilises the Incident Cause Analysis Method (ICAM) to investigate incidents ranging from near-miss events, through to multiple fatality accidents in the workplace. Developed by several experts, ICAM explores previously untouched areas of incident investigation. Other approaches typically focus upon superficial explanations; however, they do not consider the underlying factors that contributed to the actions, or the context in which they occurred. Henceforth, the ICAM framework is entirely unique in its process, resulting in the presentation of local factors and failures within the broader organisation and productive system that contributed to the incident. Luke Dam, the company’s current CEO, joined the business in 2016. However, the genesis of his career is much mor humble. Luke’s career began in the petroleum industry, where he took on a role as a maintenance technician. The repeated exposure to unsafe working conditions inspired Luke to enter the safety market – and he never looked back. ‘I then moved into a fire safety auditing role and had the opportunity to work across many different industries,’ Luke comments. ‘During this period, I had the opportunity to move into other roles within the business and quickly realised that I had a passion for training. This gave me the opportunity to mix both safety and training into the one role.’ As his career progressed, Luke began to explore various safety management and training management roles, which he later combined in safety training roles, offering him the best of both worlds. Yet in 2015, his career halted when he chose to spend time connecting May22538 S with his family – ‘I did a role reversal with my wife, giving me the chance to reconnect with my 4 children, and also for my wife to get back into full time work.’ 18 months later, with renewed vigour, Luke was ready to re-join the workforce. He was contacted by Safety Wise, who had researched him and chosen him as the perfect candidate, and four days later he started as the company’s Chief Operations Officer. By 2021, he and the CFO, Danielle Hewitt, were signing papers to take over the ownership of Safety Wise.
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