It’s been some time since I’ve made a post here on Workers' Comp Insider, but I am here both to bring sad news and to pay tribute.

Tom Lynch

My mentor, my colleague, my friend and the founder of this blog — Thomas Chapman Lynch — died Sept. 27 after a brief illness. He was 79.

Here is Tom’s “Letters from the Berkshires,” where you can find his obituary along with a note from his family.

Tom was a truly remarkable human being, and I was lucky to have him in my life over the past 30 years. He was an innovative and creative leader, passionate about human potential and human dignity. Those passions were at the very foundation of how he grew Lynch Ryan into a national consulting firm. His passions and beliefs were contagious, and he put together a remarkable team of consultants to help solve the crisis of workers' compensation, an ugly problem bedeviling employers with skyrocketing costs severe enough to drive some out of state and even out of business.

Tom had a different approach to the problem. He didn’t look at workers' comp as an insurance issue; he viewed it as a people and a management issue. When a worker was injured, employers handed things over to the insurer. Tom saw that as the original sin. He saw the workplace itself as the best place to control loss costs and the employers, more than any other group, as best positioned to reduce and control loss costs. He established a compassionate workplace-based system for injury prevention, injury management and return to work to empower employers to control costs to an absolute minimum while providing high-quality care for injured employees. The Lynch Ryan system created a user-friendly, step-by-step track for returning injured workers to full productivity.

In his own words:

“Lynch Ryan helps employers to minimize workplace losses. More importantly, it helps workers to regain productivity and return to work. In a classic case of win-win, we’ve learned that by doing the right thing for injured employees, employers save money, enhance productivity and foster improved workplace morale.”

Tom was deeply involved in creating the Massachusetts Qualified Loss Management Program with the administration of Gov. Bill Weld. Based on the Lynch Ryan approach to worker safety, it offered financial incentives for participating employers, thus spreading this program to businesses across Massachusetts and proving instrumental in solving the crisis in the commonwealth.

I was one of the people Tom hired to carry out his mission. Few of those he hired had prior experience in insurance. He amassed an eclectic team of talented people, taught them his system, passed on his convictions, principles and passions, and enabled the team to bring its own creativity and ideas to the table. Travelers Insurance acquired Lynch Ryan in 1990, further spreading this compassionate, cost-saving program to a much broader base of more than 4,000 employers, including many household-name Fortune 500s.

When I was in college, if you had told me that one of the most exciting and fulfilling work environments in my future would be in the field of insurance, I’d never have believed it.  But that’s the power of leadership. Tom was a generous leader, giving full trust to his team and their potential. He not only made me better at my work, but he also made me a better person.

Tom was always an innovator. Years later, as a communications consultant, I approached Tom with the idea of starting a work comp weblog, or a blog. At the time, there were few, if any, business-focused blogs — a handful by tech CEOs and lawyers, but mostly, they were the stuff of techies sharing interesting web developments. Always an innovator, Tom jumped at the idea, and this blog was born. It was a lonely little niche for some time, but over time, more insurance blogs began to flourish, and a network of blogs developed a community. We worked with Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters and several other blogs in a rotating, bi-weekly post called Health Wonk Review.  This was the heyday of blogs before social media supplanted and dominated internet media. He moved most of his newer writings to “Letters from the Berkshires,” his journal at Substack, where he grew a devoted following.

In Tom’s early career, he was instrumental in bringing about mandatory child seat requirements in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a model that was subsequently adopted by many other states.

But Tom wasn’t all business. Quite the Renaissance man, he nurtured varied interests in his life. He was a gifted singer, an actor, a proud veteran, a voracious reader and writer, a history lover, a traveler and totally devoted to his lovely family. He was generous, funny and kind. He had a remarkable talent for bringing the best out in people by believing in them and encouraging them.

In his life, he gave more than he took, and he left his world a better place.

Julie Ferguson is a marketing consultant for Lynch Ryan & Associates, a Massachusetts-based employer consulting firm. This column was reprinted with permission from the firm's Workers' Comp Insider blog.