By Chip Cutter
In his six years at the helm of mining giant BHP Group Ltd.,
Andrew Mackenzie has tangled with an activist investor, faced a
fatal mining disaster and made moves aimed at streamlining the
company's business.
The result, he says, is a more transparent, less bureaucratic
BHP.
The company's operations range from vast iron-ore pits in
Western Australia to copper mines in Chile and offshore oil fields
in the Gulf of Mexico. While his predecessors chased deals, Mr.
Mackenzie, a geochemist who speaks five languages, has spun off
assets, cut spending and dealt with an environmental crisis.
Last year, BHP sold the majority of its U.S. onshore oil-and-gas
unit to BP PLC for $10.5 billion, ending a costly bet on U.S.
shale. Activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. had lobbied BHP
to sell the business after building up a stake of more than 5% in
its U.K.-listed shares.
The company also has worked through the fallout from a November
2015 dam collapse at an iron-ore joint venture in southeast Brazil
that BHP owns with Brazilian mining company Vale SA. The collapse
killed 19 people and polluted hundreds of miles of rivers. The
Brazilian government later sought billions in damages, and BHP and
Vale agreed to settle some claims.
Now, Mr. Mackenzie sees other changes ahead. He wants to add
technology to more of the company's processes and says employees'
jobs are bound to evolve, among the reasons BHP recently appointed
a chief transformation officer.
He recently sat down with The Wall Street Journal. Here are
edited excerpts:
The Wall Street Journal: How has automation changed mining, and
how do you see it evolving?
Mr. Mackenzie: I would say the changes have so far been quite
small, but I think they're going to get a lot bigger. The whole
future of work is one of our top challenges to figure out, because
clearly there are opportunities for us to make our operations more
productive or environmentally friendly and safer through embracing
all of those things.
WSJ: What roles go away, and what does the workforce look like a
decade from now?
Mr. Mackenzie: I think we'll have some of our more basic tasks
like driving trucks, operating drills and some back-office work
done more automatically, using bots or fully autonomous machines,
and therefore it'd be a lot safer. We'll be much better at
planning, and planners probably would have a bigger role. But the
big change that will happen in my view, in a decade's time, is that
we will be approaching a 50-50 male and female [workforce].
We've set this as a target, as a company. We really believe in
gender balance, and we've worked at it very hard. It's tough.
There's a lot we have to do to get there. We have to make ourselves
accessible to a wider group of people.
WSJ: Mining is a male-dominated industry. Are new technologies
changing that?
Mr. Mackenzie: It's not just automation that's allowing that.
We've had to really shift our culture. You can't get away from the
fact that there are a lot of unconscious biases, I would say in the
world, but particularly in an industry that has been so
male-dominated, where all the rules had been written by
predominantly males, and predominantly white males. A lot of things
we've had to change. You don't realize until you tackle a tiger
like 50-50 [gender representation] as to how much discrimination
exists and how much naysaying there is and how much you have to
tackle head on.
WSJ: Tell me about a specific role and how it might be different
a decade from now because of technology.
Mr. Mackenzie: We employ a lot of people as truck drivers.
You'll have some truck drivers who have so much more information
that they'll be much more flexible and creative, and their trucks
will be maintained in a way that they will operate for a much
higher level of uptime.
For the more routine jobs of just shuttling back between the
mine face and where the ore is processed, that will increasingly be
done by fully autonomous trucks. Some of the people who are driving
these trucks might find that they actually end up controlling those
trucks from a remote location.
WSJ: As a leader, how do you explain to employees that roles
will change going forward without freaking them out?
Mr. Mackenzie: It's hard to completely calm individuals down if
they like a particular role and don't want it to change. How we
communicate is that we say a number of these jobs will just allow
you to be much more effective at what a human does, and therefore
you will have a more enjoyable job. You'll have machines to do the
things machines do better.
In some cases where we have a lot of manual labor, we're likely
to make the work easier. So you can do that work later in your
career. You don't get timed out by age as much. It's much more
accessible, for example, for women to do jobs.
WSJ: When you became CEO, I don't think you had a lot of
experience with activist investors. How have they changed your
management style?
Mr. Mackenzie: I do feel there were aspects of having an
activist shareholder coming to me that I didn't fully appreciate.
They're a big shareholder, they've got some good ideas. So, I said:
Let's bring them on board and listen to them. We did listen to them
hard. The challenge for me was that much of what they were telling
me I knew, and we were doing things about. So the big learning I
got was that in this modern world, we just have to be super
transparent, and we have to accept that the world demands that.
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 08, 2019 09:13 ET (13:13 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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