Initating The CSR Agenda at Rio Tinto

Let’s talk on that basis about your experience at Rio and the influence you had over that organization at the time. Could you give us a bit of context as to what contributed to your decision to work there?

I’d just finished working as a special advisor to a succession of environment secretaries and realized I needed to learn about how business really worked. Having learned how government really worked, I wanted to learn how business really worked. The only way you could do that is to go and work in a business. I had the opportunity through a friend of mine to go and work actually for both Rio and BP and I went to work for both of them part-time, because I wasn’t looking for a corporate career. I was just looking to learn and contribute. Rio Tinto at that time, it was at the time when the dot com boom was still very much on a rising curve. What Rio was discovering is that it was finding it hard to attract both capital and talent. The then CEO or executive chairman as he was of Rio, a really smart businessman called Bob Wilson realized that the company needed to learn to do things it didn’t know how to do and didn’t have people inside who knew how to do.

He recruited a world bank anthropologist and myself to drop us into the top of the company and asked us to help him think about how it managed this emerging agenda of corporate social responsibility. That was the context. It was the time when people were beginning to understand that the business case for the existence of a business was no longer as simple as, what we do is legal and profitable. It was becoming what we do is legal and profitable and socially and environmentally responsible. That was the context to which I just got dropped into Rio. In fact, was given a desk, a telephone and a computer and said, get on with it, without much guidance as to what the getting on with was supposed to do.

How did you go about setting up this infrastructure or at least pursuing the goal of embedding social environmental responsibility in the wider corporate mission?

Talking to a lot of people. In a sense, you get dropped in like that, you only find yourself in a position like that if the chief executive wants you there. You have a mandate to engage in a lot of conversations. The problem that was facing Rio in a sense was this lac of attractiveness. I was asked to go and give a talk at the top executive. Rio used to bring its top three of four hundred executives together once a year. I had to give an address. I set out to set the challenge that this was a mining industry that was thought of as dirty, dumb, and dangerous, and needed to be seen as clean, clever, and careful. I had that challenge. I engaged with a lot of the different people about how would they meet that challenge? There was no recipe. I got asked to come up with a communication strategy. If you wanted to do this, how would you communicate it? Then I started those conversations with people. Began things like writing a climate change policy in 1998. I think I drafted Rio’s first climate policy.

There are lots of things going on. I just added value to the things that were already happening, rather than came in and said, here are all of the answers. I did try one thing, which was being interested in doing a project with birds because when I was sent off to go and see what a mine was like, I discovered that there were quite a lot of people who worked in mines who were very interested in birds. I talked about setting up a bird project at work with some of the birdlife organizations to try and do this, which was met with a lot of laughter. A lot of skepticism. Until the then chief executive Lee Clifford, we did a small exercise, we just had birdwatchers on the mine sites around the world. But when Lee Clifford realized that brought the families of the workforce onto the mine site as well as the members of the local community, he saw an immediate value as it were bringing the community and the family onto the mine. He became quite a big supporter of it. The laughter tended to stop, and Rio then ran for the next ten or fifteen years, ran an extensive bird project throughout the whole company. It’s just stuff like that, really, you try things.

Then the biggest thing I did was when there was a meeting in Davis with the CEOs, and they were all very anxious about their way they were being seen as an unattractive industry. They started talking about sustainable development, it was a vogue phrase at the time, there was an effort in some parts, mostly greenwash, to talk about what was sustainable mining like? Bob Wilson in a sense ended up hosting a dinner for a lot of the CEOs, where they agreed they had to do something about sustainable development. I ended up getting that ball. I came up with and created the Global Mining Initiative, which was a very big exercise for the major mining companies globally to define their contribution to sustainable development. Rio led that effort. That was the big signature thing I did in Rio Tinto. That was a big four-year exercise which involved the top 15 or so mining companies and creating the international counsel on mining and minerals, which still exists and doing lots of other things, including turning up at the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, and define setting out its stall about what mining had to do for sustainable development.

Those are the things I did. I discovered what I discovered when I’d find myself parachuted into a government bureaucracy, that inside the company there were lots of people who wanted to do better things. If they thought you could add value, they wanted to work with you to do it. There were obviously some people who thought it was completely crazy and were not very keen. They were on the whole in the minority. At the end of the day, CEOs, chairmen set the tone in a company. The chairman wants to do it if you work with people rather than campaign against them. You’ll tend to be able to move forward somewhat. That’s how I did it.