Going for Gold: The History of Newmont Mining Corporation

15. Culture Shock

15 Culture Shock As Ronald C. Cambre took the helm as Newmont’s sixth CEO on November 1, 1993, the company was on the cusp of a new era of growth. Production at Yanacocha would begin the next day. Two weeks later, ground was broken on the Zarafshan-­ Newmont joint venture in Uzbekistan, and a feasibility study was under way for the Minahasa mine in Indonesia. In Nevada, construction had begun six months earlier on a high-­ tech roaster to treat refractory ores, and for the first time exploration was looking at underground mining, where ore grades could run ten times that of surface deposits. Immediately whisked off by Jim Hill, the company’s vice president of corporate relations, to meet analysts and investors in New York, Boston, and Toronto, Cambre listened as president Peter Philip presented the company’s upbeat outlook. Production was predicted to increase by one-­ third to two million ounces by 1997. Newmont had impressive gold reserves in North America at 25 million ounces, and, Philip noted, the industry’s largest exploration budget, $65 million in 1993, with 250 geologists and other professionals searching for new prospects in North America, Mexico, Ecua­ dor, Laos, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Arriving in Denver for the first time a week later, the new CEO faced a more sobering reality. “If you looked at the five-­ year plan, we had a growth profile that we could not staff. We badly needed to recruit talent throughout the organization.”1 Senior people were retiring, while the technical lightning rods who had built Carlin over the previous six years found the transition to management difficult. Tragically, Walter Lawrence, a talented and well-­ liked metallurgist, died of a heart attack at age forty-­ eight in 1994, less than two years after moving to Denver as senior vice president of operations. He had been uncomfortable in the suit and tie world of a twenty-­ eighth-­ floor office and at board meetings in New York. 234 chapter fifteen Just the opposite, Cambre would have moved the company’s headquar­ ters back to New York had Newmont been able to afford it. While Plato Malozemoff and Gordon Parker were miners who became executives,­ Cambre was an executive long before he put on a hard hat and boots. He thought strategically, preferred to work alone, and delegated details and mine tours to others. He valued teamwork and a cooperative process he called “matrix management ” that few could fathom. The troops wanted to know who approved their bonus checks and promotions. During his years at Freeport he rose to senior ranks, he says, without anybody having said, “‘I’m your boss.’ I got accustomed to not treating people like I was their boss. When I came to Newmont that wasn’t understood. There were people who considered me to be an intruder. I recall people telling me that what I was proposing ‘isn’t the Newmont way.’ You could just tell some people were thinking, ‘He won’t last. Then we’ll get back to being who we really are.’” Wedging between the old hands and the new CEO was one of Cambre’s first new hires, Lawrence T. Kurlander, who as senior vice president of administration had few defined responsibilities but many opinions and a say on all who came, went, or advanced within the company.2 Painfully shy, Cambre did not mingle easily with employees and welcomed Kurlander as a confidant and intermediary. Kurlander had been a prosecuting attorney in upstate New York and an appointee in Governor Mario Cuomo’s cabinet, and had worked in public relations at Ameri­ can Express and RJR Nabisco. Quickly dubbed the “cookie monster” by people at Carlin, he knew nothing of mining, showed little respect for the company’s technical heritage, and challenged conventional wisdom by, among other things, advocating fewer guns and guards at Yanacocha. “Larry came into what was an old-­ line organization that was accustomed to being treated fairly gently and Larry’s nature was to confront people. It didn’t take long for the organization to react to him,” Cambre acknowledges . Yet he helped raise the bar of professionalism in human resources, a vital but long-­ neglected department that had its origin in labor relations at Magma Copper. With approval from the board of directors, compensation, bonus programs, and stock options were meaningfully increased—a necessity if the company was going to attract and retain the talent Cambre felt it needed. [3.145.105.105] Project MUSE...