What has your career in resources been like?
It’s been 25 years, and the first 20 were like marching into a stiff
sea breeze, every day. There have been wonderful highlights,
no question, but we always had difficult, marginal projects,
and we were always struggling. You’d fix one thing and
something else would go wrong. Reflecting back on people like
my father, you say ‘never give up, never give in’. Even when you
may not be making any progress, you’ve got to hold the line.
There have been some really challenging times. I remember
at Kimberley Diamond Company when we had no money – none
whatsoever. And you think about the responsibility of being a
company director and incurring debt beyond your ability to pay.
I remember taking a second mortgage on my house to pay the
wages. It was a very small house, but the problem is you can’t
take your money back out because then you’re treating yourself
as a preferential creditor.
You need a lot of resilience. There’s a lot of battle scars. But
to some extent, you make your own luck. You can’t hope to
score a goal if you’re not in the game. You’ve got to be on the
pitch, and playing the full 90 minutes.
I feel privileged to be in this industry. Being in places like
the Arctic circle looking for diamonds with other people, flying
helicopters and seeing polar bears, dealing with the Māoris in
New Zealand and the guys in Angola and Tanzania, and dealing
with the indigenous people in Australia, and
all the characters that are involved in the
industry. Also, seeing the transformation
between getting your fingernails dirty on a
mine site and then having your diamonds
appearing on Kylie Minogue and Natalie
Imbruglia’s hand at some fashion show,
or music awards in London or New York,
you say ‘wow, this is all pretty amazing’.
Sandfire and DeGrussa is actually the
sixth mine that I’ve been involved with
in taking into production. You learn a lot
in that time. You’re always dealing with
multiple issues, and the combination of
trying to get them all to work in some
sort of harmony is not always easy
(
between market cycles, the vagaries of
commodity markets, technological issues,
metallurgical, environmental, indigenous,
geological – a whole raft of things). It’s
always challenging. It’s always fascinating!
A lot of it is an amazing adventure.
What lessons have you learned that
might assist younger managers and
aspiring leaders?
University was the best time of my life. Coming out of an adverse
situation with the unexpected termination of my sporting career
and thinking my world was over, and then going on to university
and thinking ‘this is unreal’. I’ve told my kids already that their
best time will be when they go to university and to take that
opportunity with both hands. Life can be challenging later when
you have the obligations and commitments of getting married,
and working, and all the stresses and strains that go with that.
You’ve got to keep true to yourself – be faithful and honest.
Have a spirit of adventure. From my perspective, a change is as
good as a holiday, but having a spirit for adventure is important.
You can get flat and become fairly moribund, but for me, it’s all
about wanting to grow and experience new things and meeting
new people that I find fascinating.
It’s also very important to remain steadfast and not give
in when times are tough. I think I learnt that from my early
experience as a sportsperson. I remember pushing myself in
training so hard that I felt sick – testing myself to the extremes.
But you still have to keep putting your best effort in. There are
no free lunches and no short-cuts in life. You really do get out of
life what you put into it.
I think in the mining industry, you need to properly
understand risk. A lot of people say, ‘I want to get into mining
because everybody makes a lot of money’. Well a lot of people
don’t make a lot of money. A lot of people go broke, but you
don’t often hear about that – you tend only to hear the good
news stories. You can put a lot of money in, and you can also
lose a lot of money. But you’ve got to put that into context,
because with the risk there can be significant reward. We
took a huge risk with Sandfire and put a lot into it. It could
have turned out very differently, but we were fortunate.
How would you describe your style
of leadership?
Leading is seeing an opportunity and being able to tease it out
and show it to other people. It’s about working out the things
that are not immediately obvious and opening people’s eyes to
them. That’s what I love to do.
When I look at Sandfire at the moment, it is my job to ensure
that the people who work for me have the tools and the resources
to do their job to the best of their ability. In that sense, it’s almost
like I work for them. I’ve got some really good, competent,
talented, creative, argumentative, difficult, unreasonable people,
and they work together incredibly harmoniously 99.99% of the
time. They’re very good at what they do. The people here
There’s a lot
of battle scars.
But to some
extent, you make
your own luck.
You can’t hope
to score a goal
if you’re not in
the game. You’ve
got to be on the
pitch, and playing
the full 90 minutes.
MINESITE 2012
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