Prepared by the Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering of ASCE. This TCLEE Monograph studies seven large lifeline organizations that have undertaken significant seismic improvement programs. In spite of often-cited barriers to natural hazards risk reduction, these organizations demonstrate a variety of ways to start and sustain risk-reduction programs. In these economically and politically robust organizations, top-level managers and high-level inside technical seismic advocates learned from the damage done by past earthquakes to their systems or similar systems and from research and educational programs. Then, each group developed an overall view of its system's earthquake vulnerabilities and devised adaptable, incremental seismic implementation programs.