Only those individuals who have managed to fully infuse their ethics throughout their business, personal and family lives are the true leaders, according to mining industry leader Ron Manners.
Addressing more than 300 people at last week’s WA Business News Success and Leadership breakfast, the chairman of gold miner Croesus Mining, Pilbara exploration company De Grey Mining and founder of his own Mannkal Economic Education Foundation gave a revealing account of his colourful Goldfields background, which influenced and shaped his business life.
Describing himself as a fourth generation prospector, Mr Manners has ridden the boom and bust of the resources cycle several times over.
Bearing witness to the glory days of the original Kambalda nickel boom, he compared the vibrancy of the mining industry of the time, with today’s heavily regulated resources sector.
“The nickel boom started slowly at first but Western Mining was able to get the Kambalda mine up and mining within nine months of discovery,” Mr Manners said.
“By that time they had completed the whole of the milling concentration facilities and they had built the whole of the town site and they had already been operating and producing nickel concentrates for three months.
“This is a tribute not only to the company but to the lack of bureaucratic impediment at that time.
“Today with the acceptance of the bizarre notion that everybody else has more control over a mining tenement than the actual holder of the mining tenement it would take at least five years, or perhaps never, to get a project like that off the ground.”
Mr Manners was raised in the historic town of Kalgoorlie, spending afternoons working in the family business.
His mother was the first female student to attend the Kalgoorlie School of Mines. She studied geology and instilled a passion for the subject in her son.
Describing the family home as being littered with various types of rocks, Mr Manners instead chose to study electrical engineering after being told there was no future in mining.
Today Mr Manners also remains the proud chairman of his family’s Mannwest Group of private companies, which has a history dating back 110 years to 1895.
Mr Manners spent seven years overseas “on the run” after a falling out with the Australian Tax Office, hinting that those years would provide colourful material for his fourth book.
Mr Manners returned to Australia in response to stirrings in the gold industry and established Croesus.
The company was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1986 after a $2.6 million capital raising.
It bought the CRA (now Rio Tinto) subsidiary Forrest Gold Pty Ltd gold interests for $20.3 million in an audacioius transaction that involved purchasing a letter of credit for just a matter of hours and a last minute deal with a London stockbroker.
