← Redefiners
Redefiners
Digging Deep: Leadership, Growth & Risk with BHP CEO Mike Henry
00:42:37
The world needs more metals, minerals, and natural resources to fuel the global economy, power the energy transition, and feed a growing population. As the CEO of the world’s largest mining company, BHP’s Mike Henry is redefining his business in a ...
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- [00:01]
Hoda Tahun
Call them change makers, Call them rule breakers. We call them redefiners.
- [00:06]
Clark Murphy
Join us in conversation with daring leaders who are creating extraordinary impact and driving change from around the globe.
- [00:13]
Hoda Tahun
Each episode gives you a fresh perspective on your leadership and career journey. I'm Hoda Tahun, a Leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds.
- [00:21]
Clark Murphy
I'm Clark Murphy, the former Chief Executive Officer and a Leadership advisor, and this is Redefiners. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Redefiners. It's Clark Murphy here, a leadership advisor with Russell Reynolds Associates. Hoda is unable to join me today, so I'll be flying solo on this one. But before we get started, just a quick reminder to listeners that you can find all episodes of Redefiners and the Leadership Lounge on YouTube. If you're currently watching on YouTube and you haven't subscribed to the show, just hit that subscribe button below. Subscribe you. Don't miss an episode for our audio listeners. Don't forget to rate Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts and please share your feedback on each episode. As well as we'd love guest suggestions, we'd also just love to hear from you. Give us some feedback. It'd be great. Today we're going to talk to a leader in the global mining market, which was worth almost $2 trillion in 2023 and expected to grow to about $2.8 trillion by 2028. A big part of the mining market includes resources like copper, nickel, iron ore, potash, which are essential to building and powering our world, as importantly to help feed our population as food security becomes even more important. Several Redefiner guests over the years have talked about the green energy transition, including electric vehicles. While resources like copper and nickel are key elements in that transition and critical when it comes to manufacturing EV batteries, our guest today is a leader in this effort. Mike Henry is the CEO Australia based bhp. It's the world's largest mining company. Mike leads a global workforce of 90,000 people with major operations and projects in Australia, north and South America and Canada. Prior to becoming CEO in 2020, Mike was responsible for leading BHP's Australian minerals business. So you're probably asking mining, what does that have to do given the dirty industry it's in and the crazy places in the globe that they are located? Well, this is truly a redefiner story. Mike has led the strategy to redefine this company, BHP having sold its oil and gas portfolio focused on the rare earth minerals that are so important to the global economy and potash, where the Effect of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has deeply affected food security around the world. So today we're going to talk about how does redefining a company impact the stakeholders, the shareholders, the employees, but importantly, how to be a great leader as a company redefines itself. Mike, welcome to Redefiners. We are very excited that you have joined us from Melbourne. We are on opposite ends of the world. Welcome.
- [03:00]
Hoda Tahun
Thank you, Clark. Very happy to be here.
- [03:02]
Clark Murphy
Also, Mike is truly a global citizen, having been born in Canada, spent a significant part of your working life in Asia and Australia. You taught English in Japan right after you finished university and went on to work for Mitsubishi in Canada and Australia. So before we get into supplying the world with more of what it needs and requires, how did you find your way from Canada to Japan, back to Canada and now in Australia? What's the personal story about how you ended up such a global citizen?
- [03:33]
Hoda Tahun
So, as you said, Clark, I was born in Canada, but I've spent the vast majority of my career overseas between Japan, Australia, Holland, Singapore, then back to Australia. And I've been fortunate enough to have my whole career in the resources sector. So even with Mitsubishi Corporation, I was working in their resources division and it is just a spectacular rewarding industry to be part of. There's very few industries where it goes right from kind of the ground, the earth all the way through to high finance, global capital markets and of course, downstream customers. Now, how did that all play out? As with all these things, it's a little bit of a fortunate meeting of opportunity, timing, interest and capability. As you said, I'd worked for a year teaching English just after university in Japan, and partly as a result of that, knew I wanted an international career. Mitsubishi, very well known and respected company in Japan. I was fortunate enough to get a job with them in the resources division. That took me on to Japan, ultimately down to Australia here, worked in a joint venture with BHP and then moved across to BHP back in 2003 and just had this very rewarding career with this global company where I've worked across commercial, technical, operational and then was given this great opportunity to lead the company back in 2020.
- [04:57]
Clark Murphy
And your industry, as you look at operations in Brazil, Canada, Australia, everywhere. Is it a requirement to be a global citizen? Has everyone worked around the world like you have?
- [05:08]
Hoda Tahun
I think it's a distinctive advantage and certainly the CEOs in recent memory have all had global experience in order to understand how the world works, to be able to work with the workforce that's spread over all of those jurisdictions to Be able to work with policymakers to understand their concerns around the world. Having global experience, being able to work cross culturally, I think is a distinctive advantage and a need for anybody stepping into this role.
- [05:35]
Clark Murphy
I've always been fascinated by your industry because people look at bankers and consultants and say global, but they're usually in London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco. The auto industry, in my mind, and the auto supply industry and the mining industry. I mean, we're in places that no one has ever been, and it takes a long time to get to them from Berlin or Melbourne or Toronto or someplace else. What's it like also, as a veteran, to have been in these mines around the world where it's an extra half day or day to get to your job?
- [06:12]
Hoda Tahun
Sometimes it is very difficult to get to some of these areas, but it's one of the most rewarding parts of the job. CLARK Being out in these places where our existence can have such a positive benefit for local communities in terms of economic development, opportunity, being out in the field with people on the tools or explorers in the field is truly rewarding. And it's one of the things I enjoy most about my job.
- [06:41]
Clark Murphy
In March of 2020, I gave a speech at the business school in Melbourne and got a phone call that morning from my wife in New York saying, have you followed what's going on in that part of the world? You need to get yourself on an airplane and come home. I was headed to Singapore and then up to China. Needless to say, I did not make it to Singapore or to China. And so, as I think about 2020, which was right when you became chief executive, I think the other thing I think about is the bushfires in Australia and the impact that had, as did the fires a year later in Brazil, in the Amazon, which had happened before. We were all sitting in our homes thinking about our health and thinking about our environment. That's a heck of a challenging start to be CEO. What was it like in the beginning, the first year of you being a CEO in Covid and looking down the continent at what was happening from the bushfire perspective, back to these local communities.
- [07:39]
Hoda Tahun
As context for listeners. Clark I became CEO on January 1, 2020, and as you note, within two or three months, all of a sudden, we were into the depths of COVID So it wasn't the. The start of the transition that I expected. And of course, it's easy to look back now and see with clarity how Covid played out. But in the moment, there was a ton of uncertainty as to how bad it was. Going to get. So we were all staring a little bit into the unknown. But I was very fortunate to have a board that was very supportive, experienced, had an experienced ex CEO chair who was able to provide counsel and act as a thought partner in terms of how we would navigate through Covid. And I had an experienced team that I inherited who had strong values, deeply experienced around the world. And we were able to come together, really stepping up somehow we were able to navigate all of that uncertainty and in fact we became a safer, more productive company through that period. And some of the stories from that time are things that will live on in company lore. You know, we had something like 100 or 150 train drivers over the course of a single weekend elected to move themselves and their families to Western Australia with the knowledge that borders within Australia were going to be shut down.
- [08:59]
Clark Murphy
Oh right.
- [09:00]
Hoda Tahun
And they moved across in order to keep the business running because they understood how essential the business was not only to Australia but to the, to the world. And that's one of many stories that I look back on and think, yes, it was a tough time, but it was a times that allowed ourselves to reaffirm some of what BHP is about in terms of the values that we stand for, how people can come together to achieve great things. And if we trust one another and engage one another in the right way, we can navigate some very big challenges.
- [09:35]
Clark Murphy
Now that it's five years later, you might not have said this in the beginning. Having worked with a lot of board of directors, there's always some level of concern for a first time chief executive and when will they face their first crisis? Well, yours came a little earlier and a little bit bigger in scale than most people at any moment. Did you think, oh my gosh, how am I going to get through this? Or who do I turn to to help with the decision? Were there moments of you saying I better call the chair, I better call the board because I've never been in this before?
- [10:06]
Hoda Tahun
Absolutely. Of course they were circumstances not only I had not faced before, other experienced CEOs had not faced before, and frankly my board and chair hadn't faced before either. But I knew that in the face of that uncertainty, drawing upon the collective wisdom and experience to help come up with better solutions and to align ourselves around the path that we were electing to take could only be a good thing. And the combination of that resource being available to me and the management team and then being able to draw upon an experienced, very committed management team of the day helped us to navigate Covid in A way that, as I noted, left us in a place where we were safer, more productive and where I think everybody across the organization was able to realize what we were capable of when faced with big challenges.
- [11:06]
Clark Murphy
When you look at the direction of the company in the last couple of years, a lot of M and A work you talked about the portfolio realignment, balance sheet changes, et cetera, was this a direction the company was going to take or did Covid impact what direction you thought the company should go in strategically?
- [11:26]
Hoda Tahun
So it's bang in line with the intent that we laid out as a management team and a board very early on. So we were clear that BHP is 140 years old. And one of the things that's allowed BHP to be successful over that period of time is we've constantly reinvented ourselves to align with the big trends underway in the world around us. And looking at the drivers of ongoing population growth, ongoing economic growth and rising living standards around the world, the continuing development of the economy in China, and then overlaid with the energy transition, that has certain big implications in terms of commodities that are going to be in greatest demand over the next 20 or 30 years. And so broad brush, the intent around the portfolio was to de weight in those commodities that have a greater downside risk over a three or four decade period and upweight in those commodities that stand to benefit from some of the big megatrends underway in the world around us. And that meant us growing in copper, growing in Potash, running our world leading iron ore business even more productively, even more safely across BHP and then ensuring that we had a steelmaking coal business that had only the best of the best coals that stand to benefit from the steelmaker's efforts to decarbonize. That required us to spin out our oil and gas business, merge it with another company called Woodside here in Australia. In doing so, we protected value for shareholders and gave them choice. We've optimized our coal portfolio. We've triggered two big investments in Potash in Canada and we've acquired two copper opportunities, one here in Australia that's allowed us to create a new basin in South Australia. When combining those assets with an existing copper business that BHP had, we've acquired an asset in Argentina in partnership with a Canadian company. And we've created much more copper growth optionality on top of already being one of the world's leading copper businesses with the world's largest copper resources. So we laid this, this intent out in February of 2020 and we've been executing in line with that intent. But we've only been able to execute in that way through being operationally excellent and through being clear and consistent in our strategy and building trust with shareholders through doing exactly what we said we would do.
- [13:49]
Clark Murphy
The potash business, which you have made a number of acquisitions and investments, it is what fuels literally food growth in the world. And with Russia and Belarus being one of the biggest suppliers of potash, the war in the Ukraine has affected supply chains and the supply itself. How do you look at that? And did you do these deals as a result of the war or beforehand?
- [14:14]
Hoda Tahun
There's two big potash producing regions in the world. One's Canada, the other one is Russia Belarus. We saw disruption to supply out of Russia and Belarus for a period of time and that led to a certainly uncertainty in respect of where supply was going to come from in the future and near term disruption to supply chains. Our first stage or first big investment in potash, over $5 billion US was sanctioned or we took that investment decision before the war in Ukraine. The second phase, another $5 billion was triggered after the war in Ukraine. Both of those are underway currently. Neither of them have been driven by that conflict. It's been driven by this belief that as the world's population continues to grow, which is going to require more food, rising living standards tend to require food that is less calorie efficient. So you need more agricultural inputs. And we're trying to get that increased agricultural production off of a constrained footprint of arable land. It's going to require more fertilizer. And so the demand outlook for potash is positive and will be consistent over time. And BHP, through the foresight of leaders 10, 20 years ago, has some of the world's best undeveloped potash resources.
- [15:39]
Clark Murphy
So let me get this right. The guy who runs the world's largest mining company is decarbonizing selling oil and gas assets, says we need healthier food on less arable land, which is not what grandma thinks of the average mining company. You're in essence by what you sold and what you're investing in are becoming a more sustainable company in a rough industry. I find that fascinating and ironic. Okay, so how do you balance this vision of mining in a rough, tough and pretty remote parts of the world? And I'm going to eat better because you're investing in potash. I'm obviously exaggerating a little bit for effect here, but this is pretty interesting and not what one expects, Mike.
- [16:27]
Hoda Tahun
So Clark, this is something I am so incredibly passionate about. I don't think that it's well understood that everything in the world around us starts as something either mined or something grown. I think in recent years there has been a significant uptick in understanding, certainly amongst policymakers about the importance of metals and minerals and critical minerals supply chains. They are essential to the functioning of the global economy, to ongoing economic growth, population growth, and certainly going to be critical to the world's ability to decarbonize, but also to things like artificial intelligence. You know, these big data centers are incredibly copper intensive and it's going to be one of the drivers of long term copper demand. And so the world's going to need a lot more metals, of certain metals and minerals over the next 20 or 30 years. And those metals and minerals are becoming harder to find and more costly to develop. And I don't think that there's been a good solid understanding of that. Now with the growing awareness of this, I and others are out there advocating to the public, to capital markets and the policymakers about the need for us all to come together and to figure out how we can go about finding these mines, developing these mines more quickly and efficiently, because doing so is going to be essential to meeting the world's needs for more metals and minerals in a low cost timely fashion. If we don't do that, we're going to see more by way of supply disruption, spikes in commodity prices, and ultimately the energy transition, the AI transition is going to end up being more expensive for the world than it needs to be.
- [18:11]
Clark Murphy
So like everything else, technology is a key part of the culture of what you're doing and how you go forward. How do you keep this sense of innovation and forward looking as a corporate culture? Because many people say it's not. The technology certainly is the power of need of technology, but it's cultural change where machine learning and AI come to the fore.
- [18:36]
Hoda Tahun
There's always more we can do in this regard. But it's one of the other little known facts perhaps about the industry is that it does big technologically advanced things already. You know, if you think about finding these deposits 400 meters under the Earth's crust, or a kilometer or two kilometers under the Earth's crust, that alone is hard and requires the world's most advanced technologies. Then getting the ore out, processing it, getting it to the market in an efficient fashion requires, you know, really advanced technology. We have driverless trucks on our sites. These are 400 ton trucks that are driving around our sites with no driver at the wheel, all working autonomously. And we've been doing that before. You had Autonomous vehicles on public roads. Now there is a big opportunity in artificial intelligence. In fact, I don't think we yet realize how significant the opportunity will be. We simply know it's going to be great. Now we're already applying AI in finding new resources in figuring out how to best extract them and managing our supply chains and optimizing our, our processing plants and so on, but we know there's more to go. And part of unleashing the potential of artificial intelligence is, as you say, going to be a culture and capability change in the company. As with all industries and all companies now how do we go about doing that? Of course it's building capability in the company. So we are training people in this regard. It's through establishing the success cases right across the company. It's through ensuring that the senior team really understands this. And so we have a specific effort underway today to re baseline us all in terms of our understanding of artificial intelligence so that we're better equipped than to lead the 80,000, 90,000 people across the company on this journey.
- [20:29]
Clark Murphy
We talk about collaboration and you have the BHP operating system which has been so successful and not to flatter you on the podcast, but you're regarded as the ability to inculcate the culture with consistency of 90,000 people through this operating system. Talk about this balance of the system that's company wide. A lot of people put things on the wall, but it doesn't really happen. It appears to have happened at bhp. How and why?
- [21:02]
Hoda Tahun
So it's happening. Clark and this where I would start by again, for the sake of transparency, saying that we're on a journey. We first deployed the BHP operating system back in 2017, 2018 and the philosophy behind it was it's a people centric system. So let me start by saying that it was really to say that, you know, BHP operates in a highly dynamic environment. We're operating all over the world, in tough jurisdictions, in tough circumstances where you're dealing with a geological uncertainty, weather uncertainty. We operate cross culturally with different workforces, workforce force compositions, and against that backdrop, we need to equip our people to be able to make the best possible decisions in the face of that uncertainty on a day to day basis. And we need to equip them and engage them in a way that better harnesses their experience and ingenuity. Leaders in BHP need to see themselves as being enablers of their teams, being coaches of course, providing a degree of direction, but really moving away from a top down command and control type culture to one where we're able to engage our people more effectively and to trust their ability to drive improvement in the business day in and day out. And you know, we spoke about COVID earlier. This was one of the great proof points through Covid was that given how quick the world around us was moving, we needed to trust people on the front line to make the right decisions. We made decisions more quickly, we were a safer business and we became a much more productive business. And I overlay that then with everything that we're trying to achieve through the BHP operating system, which has a series of principles behind it and a series of practices that everybody gets trained around. And this starts with high level company strategy, how we align it to what's happening on the ground with that strategy, and then how we go about equipping our people to drive business improvement day in and day out. And that's allowed us to become a leading operator in the sector where we're known for our operational reliability and operational excellence. One example of that is our iron ore business has been the lowest cost major iron ore business in the world now for five years running. That helps us to build trust with shareholders and it creates a greater foundation from which we're able to do the big things that we do as a business. And of course it allows us to be more consistent over time as well. Because with that embedded in the DNA, the very fabric of the company, we're less reliant upon individual leaders. And it will change over time.
- [23:40]
Clark Murphy
We lean towards successes and stories here. When was there some part of the operating system or the implementation you thought was going to be perfect and you went, whoa, got that wrong. Let's pull back and redesign this.
- [23:54]
Hoda Tahun
And that's why I said up front, Clark, we're on a journey. And I'd love to be able to say that every part of BHP has progressed at exactly the same pace on this, but that's not the case because this is a huge culture change and capability change. It's natural that there's going to be some parts of the organization that move more quickly than others. Now what have we seen is when leaders really embrace the BHP operating system and not just from an intellectual perspective, but from a emotional connection to what it is that we're trying to achieve by way of better engaging and enabling the front line of the business. That's where we see the implementation of the BHP operating system done most reliably and most quickly, I think, where we've had instances where leaders may get it intellectually, but it's seen as an add on to existing work. Rather than a way of working. Sometimes the headline metrics suggest that the implementation is going well and we only find out a year or two or three down the road that actually it hasn't gone quite as well as we expected and we start to see a regression in capability of the business. So this is something that we measure at every operation across bhp. We regularly assess how well the operating system is being implemented and in a number of instances we've seen that it stalls or it regresses and we have to go back in and redeploy. And so the real lesson for me is that one, culture change takes time. It requires a huge level of organizational commitment from senior leaders on down. And for something like the BHP operating system, it has to be both an intellectual and emotional commitment to it for it to be implemented effectively.
- [25:42]
Clark Murphy
You've talked several times about policymakers and again to say for the thousandth time, you're in a global business. Multiple countries, multiple regions of the world. The politics of the world are complicated.
- [25:56]
Hoda Tahun
To say the least, to say the least.
- [25:59]
Clark Murphy
How do you continue to make progress as countries maybe are becoming more nationalistic, less global, to understand this journey you all are on when being asked by the world with population growth, hopefully economic growth, cleaner growth, to be the company you want to be. But the policymakers might be more complicated in parts of the world.
- [26:22]
Hoda Tahun
It's definitely become more uncertain and more complex in recent years and were an industry that has benefited from multiple decades of relatively free trade and an absence of industrial policy, which at times can serve to distort markets. The reality of the world that we live in today is, you know, governments are needing to focus on, you know, cost of living crisis. Globally, there's geopolitical concerns at play and we've seen this resurgence of trade protectionism and industrial policy. That's the real world that we live in. And from a corporate strategy perspective or a company perspective, the way that we deal with that is, number one, being out there sensing the world around us and making sure that we're bringing back into our kind of day to day thinking the way that we run the business, an understanding of the currents that are at play in the world around us and that can be at the local level, all the way up to the global level. Secondly, we have to ensure that we are seen as a business to be creating value for the broad range of stakeholders that we interact with, including, but beyond shareholders. And so we focused on having a very distinctive social value proposition. And thirdly, we need to be out there as leaders advocating for our industry and for sound policy. And so part of that is education. We spoke earlier about the, you know, the lack of awareness in some quarters as to what mining is about and its essential nature. So I've spent time, as have my team on the road out, engaging policymakers and other stakeholders on trying to build that understanding of mining. And off the back of that understanding, then to talk about what sound policy looks like that both enables the industry, but also meets the very valid concerns of policymakers at the national level through to the local level.
- [28:19]
Clark Murphy
So we talk about emotional commitment to a culture in a mining company. We talk about social value of the mining industry. None of this is what anybody thought when they clued into a podcast about mining and taking things out of the earth. Okay, so talk to me a little bit more about social value and how you embed, embed that in the culture of the company. So we believe in what we're doing and that others believe in what we're doing.
- [28:46]
Hoda Tahun
So let's think about this, Clark. As a mining company, you think about what we're doing. We're going into some of these remote communities and we're investing billions of dollars in these projects that play out over 20, 30, 40 years, sometimes, sometimes longer. And we only gain access to those resources in the first place if we have the support of governments and communities. So we have to have a value proposition for them. Now, social value has been at the center of BHP's thinking for two or three decades. But a couple of years ago, we put in place a refreshed social value framework. And it's distinctive nature of the social value framework is that it treats social value creation not as something that stands alongside the business, but this is core business. We need to be thinking about how we can go about creating best possible value for shareholders and best possible value for the other, the range of stakeholders that we have. And in order to enable that, it needs to be something that is owned by all decision makers in the business. And so it's not about us sacrificing economics, it's about investing discretionary effort in ensuring that we can maximize our economic outcomes, but at the same time ensure that we're supporting, in this case, local stakeholders by way of local businesses, oftentimes indigenous businesses or first nations businesses, so that they benefit from our existence as well.
- [30:14]
Clark Murphy
And that's gotta be an endless campaign because there are skeptics out there, there are people, protesters, there's everything. So you gotta tell the story again and again and be authentic in seeing the results, right?
- [30:26]
Hoda Tahun
We do. So it is Endless. And that's why it's important that it's part of core business. But the other point I would note is that in many instances we're increasingly engaging in co creation or co design of outcomes such that we build trust with stakeholders and they feel that they've had a say in the way that outcomes are pursued. And one example of this would be at we have a coal mine in New South Wales that is reaching well within five years from now will reach the end of its economic life. In deciding how we go about the process of closing that mine and transitioning it, given the reliance of the local community on the mine, given the fact that we've got 2,000 workers, many businesses serving that mine, we announced early on the intended closure and then we pulled together a process by which we can co create the approach to closure and the approach to transition with local stakeholders. And that served to build a lot of trust. It's also served to better inform some of our thinking and how we go about this. And at the end of the day, it's going to create better outcomes for the range of stakeholders that currently depend on that mine because they'll be able to have their say in the process.
- [31:44]
Clark Murphy
We often ask if in your career there's been a redefining or defining moment of you as a leader, do you have a redefining moment?
- [31:54]
Hoda Tahun
I've been asked this before and it's hard to boil it down to one. I have been super fortunate over the course of my career in terms of the leaders that I've worked with. And by that I mean I've worked with some very big thinkers, with people who've had a lot of aspiration and who've demonstrated a huge degree of trust in me as a leader and have been willing to trust the direction that I was setting. And so I wouldn't boil it down to one point, I would boil it down to one factor which is that the trust that I recognize that has been placed in me over time is something that I've sought to demonstrate as a leader as well, because I know the power of it.
- [32:39]
Clark Murphy
So you're playing it forward that those who trusted you, you're going to put trust in others.
- [32:43]
Hoda Tahun
Exactly. Yes.
- [32:45]
Clark Murphy
We talked about innovation in every organization. You have a, I think a corporate venture capital arm so that you're seeing what's emerging, what's happening. Again, we tend to think of pharma companies and consumer businesses as thinking about the future and the venture backed. How do you think about innovation? How do you think about investment? Whether it's the VC arm or not. How do you think about that?
- [33:09]
Hoda Tahun
There's three areas that I would point to in terms of specific innovation efforts within bhp. One is the Ventures arm that you've called out. We established that from memory back in 2020, maybe 2021. So the explicit intent around the Venture Ventures arm is to be investing in small startups in the resource finding, extraction, processing and decarbonization space. And through that for us to gain early insight into some of these technologies that have the potential to support or disrupt different supply chains across our business that will help inform strategy. In some instances, it will give us early insight into opportunities that we may wish to pursue. And of course we want to generate a investment return on these. And we had a six times return on a carbon capture opportunity that we invested in. So the track record so far has been pretty strong. In addition to that, we borrowed a concept out of Pharma to apply in minerals exploration. So we have an exploration accelerator called Xplor where we engage with 200 plus companies annually. They pitch their ideas to us, we select 10. We've been doing that for a few years now where we provide them with some funding and capability building to enable them to pursue their concepts. And again, this gives us greater insight into what's happening in the world around us in the very early stages of exploration. And then finally we have an innovation arm within the company that's investing time and effort directly in technologies that may enable the business and in a disruptive way over the long term. Now, in pursuing all of these, there's the direct benefit that we derive from them, but it's also been part of us trying to stimulate a culture of innovation, excitement around what lies ahead and passion for innovation right across bhp, not just in the people working in those three parts of the company.
- [35:09]
Clark Murphy
Your third point, innovation inside the company to disrupt the elephant dancing versus the startup. Do you find one is a greater accelerator of change for you as a culture versus the other?
- [35:25]
Hoda Tahun
The reality is there's benefit to having your innovation efforts a little bit standalone from the mainstream. And I do think we've made progress on embedding innovation through the fingertips of the organization. When you've got people who are dedicated to pursuing some of these out there ideas who are unleashed a little bit and trust and supported by management either within the company or, or because they stand outside the company, you do then tend to see an acceleration. The challenge for us then is how do we go about stimulating more of that right throughout the company, but also how do we go about taking some of these ideas when they've reached a certain stage and rolling them back into the company. Because I think sometimes they can get stalled on implementation even if they're good ideas. And this is an area that we continue to work on and I think where we've made great progress. When I combine that then with the BHP operating system and its focus on business improvement, the potential to be unlocked here is quite significant.
- [36:24]
Clark Murphy
The boyfriend of my daughter is a geological engineer, works in a mine in Montana and I called him this morning and said what am I supposed to ask Mike Henry? Talk mining to me, okay? And he's in a hurry, he wants to go. He may not stay at BHP or somewhere else for a long term. What's your advice to the emerging young employee hoping to be an executive about risk versus reward, Staying with it versus pushing outside? How do you look at a career for someone today?
- [36:54]
Hoda Tahun
I want BHP to be a company where people are able to take risks, to push the boundaries and have a rewarding career with the company. It would be a shame if people believed they needed to move across companies in order to get those opportunities and to do exciting things. I think BHP is increasingly a company where people are able to get opportunities across different disciplines, different geographies and where they feel trusted by leaders to pursue some of their big ideas. And that's evident in some of the concepts that we spoke about earlier where ventures are that's relatively new to bhp. This explore concept is new to BHP and some of what we've been doing across the broader company in terms of the risks we've been taking at a high level around portfolio through to what happens on a day to day basis in the business, deployment of technology and so on. I want this to be an exciting place for employees to be where they feel that they can build their career, can take risks and continue to drive personal growth from the opportunities that are afforded within the company.
- [38:03]
Clark Murphy
Mike, we end the podcast every time with a series of rapid fire questions. You just answer right with what's on the top of your mind instantly. Okay, first question. You've lived all over the world. Where in the world would you choose to live? If you can live anywhere personally, it doesn't matter where you're working. Where would you live?
- [38:18]
Hoda Tahun
Oh, tough question. So Melbourne is a great city, one of the world's great cities. But my family, my partner are back in Canada and so some point in the distant future when I like to hang up the boots, that's probably where I end up.
- [38:30]
Clark Murphy
You're managing operations all over the world, you travel NonStop. What's your one habit that helps you decompress, keeps you grounded, gets you relaxed?
- [38:39]
Hoda Tahun
Exercise. And so these jobs are tough jobs. You spend a good amount of your time on the road. It's easy to get into 24, 7 work. So I'm very disciplined about exercise. Right. Throughout the course of the year. And nutrition.
- [38:57]
Clark Murphy
If you weren't in the job you were in today, what would you be doing instead?
- [39:03]
Hoda Tahun
Interesting question. I genuinely don't know because I love this job so much, Clark. I fell into it. It wasn't that I pursued a career in mining, but I feel so incredibly fortunate to have landed in mining. There's not been a day in my career where I wished I was working in a different sector, because I said one day I can be literally in the field with people on the tools, talking to them about their lives, their experience in the business, local communities. And the following day, I can be in New York, London, Tokyo, in the world of high finance, or with our customers, the end users of our products, seeing how our products can contribute to economic development and lifting people out of poverty. There is no job that compares to this job or this industry.
- [39:53]
Clark Murphy
Well, that's why you're good at what you do. I have to laugh. My grown children, all in their 20s, they know I love what I do. I absolutely love what I do. Like having a conversation like this. And they said, dad, no, you didn't tell me that people go to work every day. They don't like what they do. So, last question. What's the one piece of advice you would give to a new chief executive?
- [40:18]
Hoda Tahun
Trust. You know, so, so, so build trust and trust others. And that, that applies to your relationship with your board, your chair, certainly with your executive team, and then with shareholders. So understanding the concerns of shareholders and other stakeholders, really internalizing that and seeking to address those concerns and to build trust will make you a better CEO, a better management team, and will allow you to achieve or better enable you to achieve the ambitions that you have for the. For the company.
- [40:51]
Clark Murphy
First of all, Mike, thank you for being here. From all the way around the world, in Melbourne, literally the other side of the world. We really appreciate it, as do our listeners. If I take away a couple of thoughts, it's where you ended, is where you started about trust. You're a business that fuels economic growth, population growth, food, how we drive, where we live, what we do, the materials for that. But yet you're decarbonizing, you're trying to work on the nutrition of the world. At the same time and answer to policymakers who question where the mine is and why but yet ask you for more of the extraction from those mines but building consistency in how you operate a business, consistency in the integrity of both the operations and the decisions that people make and understanding. It's not a zero sum game, it's a journey to keep pursuing who is bhp, what can it be and therefore how you lead. Which I think is some super, super interesting lessons that we've learned today. So thank you very being here. We greatly appreciate it and look forward to learning more about what's going on. Thank you.
- [42:06]
Hoda Tahun
Thank you Clark. I love that summary. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Redefiners. For more compelling insights from leaders across industries and around the world, listen to Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:18]
Clark Murphy
To learn more or get in contact with us, follow Redefiners podcast on Instagram, find Russell Reynolds Associates on LinkedIn X and YouTube and visit our website at russellreynolds.com.