Don Lindsay, President and CEO, Teck Resources

Goldy Hyder:

Welcome to Speaking of Business, conversations with Canadian innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. I’m Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada. Today I’m speaking with Don Lindsay, president and CEO of Teck Resources. Teck is Canada’s largest diversified resource company, a leading producer of copper, zinc, steel-making coal, and energy.

Mining has traditionally been seen as a tough, gruff, and hard-nosed industry, but Don himself doesn’t fit any stereotype. In fact, his reputation as one of the most admired CEOs in Canada’s resource sector owes a lot to the care he consistently shows for his family, employees, country, and the global community. Enjoy our conversation.

Don, thanks for doing this.

Don Lindsay:

Delighted to be here, Goldy.

Goldy Hyder:

Well, we’ll see how you feel about that when it’s over.

Don Lindsay:

I guess. But I’ve listened to a couple of the other ones and they were very good.

Goldy Hyder:

I’m glad to hear it. So let’s start with who you are. Who’s Don Lindsay? What’s your story?

Don Lindsay:

I’m a dad, three daughters, the delight of my life. I’m a Canadian. I’ve lived coast to coast. I was in Newfoundland for five years. I grew up in Toronto. My family’s from Alberta. I live in BC now. I’ve canoed 26 of Canada’s rivers in the north and Ontario and Quebec. Proud of being a Canadian.

Goldy Hyder:

And now you call BC home?

Don Lindsay:

I certainly do. I’m passionate about BC.

Goldy Hyder:

Well, you were a bit of a mining geek as a young boy from what I read, and perhaps even a finance geek. Is it true that you bought your first shares at the age of 10?

Don Lindsay:

It is true. Actually, I was on a canoe trip with my father, and I visited my first mine in Lake Temagami. And by coincidence, it was a Teck mine. It was a mine that was discovered by the father of my recently retired chairman, Temagami Copper. It was 32% copper. Do you know what we mine now at Highland Valley Copper? 0.32%, 1/100th the grade. Anyway, that was my first mine tour, and I have a sample from that tour on my desk in Teck’s head office.

A year later, with my paper route money, I bought two shares of a gold company called Leach Gold Mines, and it turned out to be controlled by Teck. And the chairman of that company was my just retired chairman’s father, and my just retired chairman was the vice president. And the story goes that I bought those two shares for $2.30 cents each a share, and they were suing an American company called Texas Golf for the rights to Kidd Creek. That was a big copper and zinc discovery. And if they won the lawsuit, the shares were supposed to go to $80 a share. So I would’ve had $160. Do you know how many bicycles $160 would’ve bought? I would’ve been the bicycle king of the neighborhood. Anyway, we didn’t win the lawsuit. I lost the money and it’s very important to lose money in your first investment.

Goldy Hyder:

What lesson did you learn from that?

Don Lindsay:

Well, first of all that there’s more to the story than you might’ve been told, that assessing all the risks and developing, I’d call it, critical thought. Stories can get very exciting and you get all wrapped up in it, but being able to analyze things and make up your own mind about some issues is pretty important.

Goldy Hyder:

Did you always know you were going to get into mining?

Don Lindsay:

No. In fact, most people thought I was going to be a doctor because my father was a doctor, I actually come from a long line of doctors. This is in the ’60s, but doctors tend to socialize with doctors, all the other mothers wanted their sons to become doctors, rightly or wrongly, that’s how it was. And most of my parents’ friends’ sons did become doctors, and I didn’t. And when I was being driven down to Queen’s University to enter mining engineering. So the first year of engineering is still general, but the second year you’re starting to specialize. I had the classic line delivered by my mother about 10 miles outside of Kingston.

She said, “Now, you’re going into mining engineering. Doesn’t that make it more difficult for you to get in medicine?” It’s one of those things, but…

Goldy Hyder:

“Tell me how you really feel, mom.”

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, but you know what? In the end, I think she’s probably pleased on how it worked out.

Goldy Hyder:

Yeah, you went through a circuitous route, banking. How did you end up in finance?

Don Lindsay:

So I studied mining engineering. I did go off to work in the mines, I’d worked underground in Uranium City in Northern Saskatchewan, and then I worked in a large open pit iron ore mine, the Iron Ore Company of Canada. Brian Mulroney was president of the company at that time.

And then the deep recession of 1982, 83 hit, and I was on a special task force of Brian Mulroney’s to help reduce the size of the workforce. And so everything I did meant that people lost their jobs. And so ultimately, I could see my own number on the wall coming up quick, and I went back to school and got an MBA at Harvard.

And that led me into the financial area where for the first two, three years I thought I’d be working as a generalist. I’d find what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, some new passion, and I never really did. And I always thought it was better to do something than do nothing, to keep working, and eventually I just kept rising in the ranks. It was first Wood Gundy, then CIBC took over, and next thing you know I was president, but I was there for 20 years.

Goldy Hyder:

How important is passion in what we do?

Don Lindsay:

I think it’s vital. You go to work, your day’s been so much a part of your life. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, then what’s it all about?

But I think what I’ve learned is this, that I wasn’t necessarily passionate about finance, even though I spent 20 years at CIBC and Wood Gundy before that. What I was passionate about was the teams of people that worked together on these big deals. We did the largest M&A deal, the largest financing, the largest IPO, all these things. I don’t remember much the details of those deals, but I remember the people that we went through battle to win the business, to get the deal done, and we were also proud of it and celebrated at the end of it. It is the people that remain in your memory and that are still special.

Goldy Hyder:

And how did you move from banking to Teck?

Don Lindsay:

Well, it was sort of one of those things where, because I’d built up this global practice… In the early days of finance, everybody was a generalist. And I put a business proposal to senior management and said, “I’d like to start a mining finance team.”

And eventually they said yes, and I was the first full-time employee, and a friend of mine, Warren Gilman, was sort of half-time. And then he became full-time, and we built this thing up with offices in Toronto, and New York, and Vancouver, and Sydney, Australia, and London. And next thing you know, we sort of built this capability that the clients, including Teck where I’m now, but at the time, Noranda and Falcon Bridge, and so on, that they really appreciated the, I’d call it, the intelligence of what their competitors were doing. As we traveled the world, we could bring back, this was before the internet, of course, we could bring back information about who was buying copper, who was selling zinc, what were they really thinking strategically. So we carved out a bit of a position with the clients and then eventually a client offered me a job.

Goldy Hyder:

Now it’s one of the largest mining companies here in Canada. Give the listener an overview. What do you do? Where do you operate? How many people you employ in terms of your footprint?

Don Lindsay:

Well, we call ourselves the largest diversified resource company. We have gold companies like Barrick and Goldcorp, there’s other energy companies, of course, that could be very large. Our main products are copper, zinc, steel-making coal was distinguished as opposed to thermal coal that everyone is worried about. And then the energy division that we do have an all-sands operation in partnership. Suncorp is the operator, and then Total from Paris as well. So four main divisions.

But in fact, it’s said that we either produce or consume every single element in the periodic table. And that’s because we have a large complex in Trail, British Columbia that very… it’s like a very complicated chemistry set and all sorts of elements and minerals are involved in that. So yeah, we also produce gold and silver, and molybdenum, and indium, which you need in all of your flat screens on your phone or your TV, germanium for infrared night vision, that sort of thing, all sorts of crazy elements, so it’s a fascinating place.

Goldy Hyder:

It’s a very cyclical business mining. It gets impacted by sort of the booms and the busts of economies. Take us through some of the challenges that you’ve faced, and how did you deal with that?

Don Lindsay:

The cyclicality has become more intense. The highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the cycle is compressed now. The cycles that used to be seven or eight years seem to be two or three years now. And with that volatility, it changes how you should manage a company. You’ve got to have an even more conservative balance sheet.

We’ve ridden a few cycles since I’ve been there. There was the global financial crisis, of course, which was an extraordinarily challenging time. We had just made a very large acquisition, a little over $13 billion.

Goldy Hyder:

Wow.

Don Lindsay:

And when we announced the deal, because it was an innovative structure, our share price went up about $10, the buyer’s share price went up in two or three days.

Goldy Hyder:

Sounds good.

Don Lindsay:

And the New York hedge funds were actually protesting the deal, buying stock to try and vote it down because I had been on the board of Forwarding Trust, they said I got a sweetheart deal, and they were all against it. Two months later, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and Citi almost went bankrupt, and the month of October of 2008, which was the single worst month in all of capital market’s history, and we had to close the deal that month. Then they were saying just the opposite. They wanted to see the deal unfold. In any event, we closed the deal. We put together what’s now become sort of famous the 12-step plan, which I named it that deliberately. We had it cleanly executed in six months and back on track and away we go.

Goldy Hyder:

You’ve just taken over as the chair of the Business Council of Canada, you have a record of really wanting to advocate and cultivate Canadian champions. Where does that come from, and what can we do about it now looking forward?

Don Lindsay:

Well, I really am a proud Canadian. I wear the jersey as is, and I have even a program at Teck that we call our Excellence Awards where people from all across the company, from Alaska to Chile, from London to Beijing, where we reward employees from the front lines with a special trip to the Olympics because I want them to see champions. We’re trying to build a Canadian champion on the world stage. We’ve made a lot of progress so far. We’ve got a long way to go. But to have the employees on the same page as that and to be inspired by the same sort of thing…

When you go to the Olympics, you see such inspiring stories. You could go to an event that you know nothing about and still come out of it two hours later, converted to be a lifelong fan of that particular sport. And I like to see all of our employees sharing that same passion. And so that’s really what we’re trying to build.

Goldy Hyder:

Let’s talk about looking forward though. How do we build Canadian champions today in today’s environment, which is so much more uncertain and a lot more global competitiveness?

Don Lindsay:

That’s for sure. We slug it out against the largest companies in the world. I think it’s very important that Canadians, generally, and our political leaders specifically recognize that it is important to have Canadian champions, that that is part of nation-building. And that if you want to have a country where people are proud, whether they’re proud of Olympic champions, business champions, champions in the arts. Canada has extraordinary singers, for example. Shania Twain and Celine Dion outsold Madonna. We’ve got people like that and they’re culturally appreciated by everybody who comes to Canada. And I think we need to encourage those kind of role models for people to look up to, and business should be encouraged as well.

It’s been fashionable at times to be down on business, not necessarily recognized and appreciated, but think about what business does for our society. The jobs that it creates, the community investment that it does… If you look at Teck as a whole, we have communities all over the country where those towns know they depend on us, and they also know that we treasure their participation in our company, and that we back their community, and invest in it. And so building Canadian champions like that, I think, is really important for the country.

Goldy Hyder:

Obviously when I’m interviewing Canada’s leading CEOs and people in the business community, I want to talk about leadership. What does leadership mean to you?

Don Lindsay:

At the end of the day, everything gets done through people. And the people need to be motivated, inspired, need to believe, need to be on the same page, they need a North Star. They need to know the direction they’re going. And the leaders of the organizations, in some cases, you really don’t do very much work. I often say I don’t actually do any work. I do two or three things. First, I set tone at the top that people know for sure what I care about, what’s important to me. Second, I choose the people, the key people on the team. And if they have the same values, if they have the same ambition and inspiration that I have, then they will choose people themselves, and then you get alignment in the organization. In fact, most of the time those are the only two key things that count.

Every now and then, you may be the lead deal maker on a transaction of you’re building a company or the face of the company. You’re always the face of the company, but sometimes you’re a very prominent face of the company. But people watch leaders very carefully. I know when I walk onto the elevator that the odds are high, that people are watching to see whether I’m in a good mood or a bad mood. How’s my posture? Am I looking at my shoes? Am I watching the screen in the elevator? And they’ll go back and tell people in their workplace, Don’s in a good mood or he is not, and they’ll overinterpret what I might be thinking. So I think leaders have to be very conscious of things like that.

Goldy Hyder:

Leadership has also changed and evolved over time. How have you seen the changes, and what impact has the way leadership has changed to becoming less top-down, less hierarchical, less command and control to the approaches that are now being used? And how’s that been good for your business?

Don Lindsay:

Well, I think it’s both because on the one hand, in the age of rapid communications and so on, you can send messages very broadly, and it can be far more participatory in terms of decisions and so on, and so it’s less of the old style, almost military complex type of leadership. On the other hand, for large businesses, public companies in particular, the world has evolved such as that regulators, the securities commissions, and so on want to have a neck grab. They want to have someone who is signed off, and verified everything, and it was taking responsibility. And it’s now evolved to a point that I don’t think is really practical, although it is just the way it is, where they hold one person accountable for everything, where all sorts of decisions have to go to the very top, and be signed off. And I don’t think it’s really practical, but it’s what’s required in today’s business. I would prefer it to be much more of a partnership and shared responsibility/accountability, because I think in the end that’s a more effective way of getting things done.

Goldy Hyder:

So what’s keeping you up at night as a leader these days?

Don Lindsay:

Well, I’m very worried about geopolitical risk. This issue that Canada has with China could have long-lasting consequences. When I say long-lasting, it could be a ten-year issue. It can have a far greater impact than perhaps people realize. In the resources business, not just metals and mining, but energy for sure, China’s the incremental buyer of everything. They set the price. And I think we have to be cognizant of just how much an effect they have on the global economy and their continued growth. We think their growth is slowing down to 6.4%, but the math is 6.4% of last year’s GDP is a bigger number than it was the year before. The incremental dollar value of the growth is actually still growing. And so that’s not going to stop in the foreseeable future, so we need to figure out how to get along with China.

Goldy Hyder:

One of the other areas we like to explore is how do leaders at your level manage work-life balance? You’ve got three daughters, your partner, Jennifer, is getting close to wrapping up her career in healthcare.

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, she is.

Goldy Hyder:

How are you going to square that circle in terms of you still being the CEO of Teck and trying to make this all work for everybody? How did you do it?

Don Lindsay:

It is a very tough challenge. Of course, for most of us, by the time we get to a position like this, we’ve been juggling for a long time and you do get better at it. But you do have to have absolute clarity on your priorities and know for sure when very special days for your children are, like the school concerts or the field hockey final, those kind of things. No matter where you are in the world, you’ve got to be back for that.

Fortunately, when you are the CEO, you do have a lot of influence over the schedule so you can make things happen. You have to recognize that there is no such thing as a holiday. You are on 24/7, you’re responsible at all times, you carry two cell phones, and always reachable so you can actually schedule to be different places, you’re always on the job. Whether you’re theoretically on vacation, you could be at Whistler. In my case, I’m still on the job there, but I’m with my family.

Goldy Hyder:

Now don’t you feel that, “I need to turn off. I need to unwind. I need to clear my head”?

Don Lindsay:

When I unwind, probably it’s on my annual canoe because people find it very difficult to reach me there where?

Goldy Hyder:

Where is that?

Don Lindsay:

Well, this year we’re going to the mountain river. It’s like the river guides bucket list river, it’s in the Northwest Territories, near Norman Wells. It’s a spectacular river that starts off literally as a little creek that’s almost the width of the canoe, and you’re pushing and shoving. The first part of it, they call push me, shove you or something to get the canoe there.

And then, of course, all the tributaries are flowing into the river and it gets larger and larger until it’s more of a slalom course like you’d find in Ontario Quebec. And eventually, it’s a raging torrent that ends in the Mackenzie River. And so this will be a 10-day trip. I go with several other mining CEOs, in fact. We’ve been doing this for several years, and then we’ll be disconnected in that there’s no cell signal. But we all carry a satellite phone and at least once or twice a day we still check in.

Goldy Hyder:

Now you’re also a marathoner?

Don Lindsay:

I have run a few. Yeah.

Goldy Hyder:

Yeah, and you’ve also climbed Kilimanjaro. Tell us about those experiences.

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, well the marathon, I guess the first one was Boston because I was going to school at the Harvard Business School at the time. And for a while, I ran one every five years just to sort of measure my deterioration as I got older. And then eventually the knees didn’t like it so much, but then it turns out this year I have one daughter in Boston at Boston University and she challenged me to run it again. And I have one daughter in London at King’s College and she’s challenged me. And so I’ve actually accepted, I’m going to run the London Marathon on April 28 this year.

Now, we’ll see how it goes, but here’s what really counts. What really counts is that by accepting the challenge that those two daughters, age 19 and 20, that they’re going to do it, and what they’re going to learn is that this big scary goal called the marathon, that that too that they can accomplish if they put the time in, show the determination, do the homework by running the miles week-to-week, that they can accomplish that too. And if I can help them learn that lesson early in life, I think that’ll be very valuable.

Goldy Hyder:

It strikes me as interesting of how many CEOs I’ve met that are marathoners, and even my predecessor, John Manley, was a marathoner. You think there’s a reason behind that? That CEOs, what? Are we suckers for punishment? Do they like to challenge themselves? What is it about marathons that seems to attract CEOs?

Don Lindsay:

People do like to challenge themselves. Persistence, endurance is a big part of the job, and a marathon defines that, of course. And I think once you’ve done it, the odds of wanting to do it again are fairly high. Not that you’re going to do it every year, but there’s something about how it tests you. Or it’s a measurement of where you stand physically and proving to yourself that you can still do it. I’m 60 years old, but I maybe still have something to prove to myself.

Goldy Hyder:

Kilimanjaro?

Don Lindsay:

That was back in 1988, 89. My parents actually organized the family trip of a lifetime. We started in Cairo, worked our way down safaris in Nairobi, and ultimately to climb Kilimanjaro. So my five sisters, myself, and my parents, we all left together from the final campsite to climb the last 4,000 feet vertical.

It was very interesting because it was December 31st, it was New Year’s Eve. Actually, it was midnight January 1st 1989. And we had wanted to be the first people up to the peak on the 100th year anniversary of I think whenever the first person had done it or at least known person. Everybody started off together, but one-by-one, they faded. But still five of us got to Gilman’s Peak, which is the first point. And then one sister and myself went on to Uhuru where you had to go down around the crater and back up to the top.

We were about 100 yards from the peak, and all of a sudden, a Japanese team that came up a different route got there first. And my sister just sat down in the snow. And our guide, and so we tried to get her up and she would not move. And I thought, “My God, what are we going to do here? We’ve got to get her. We’re this close.”

Ultimately she did. And remember, it’s 19,380 feet elevation. There’s very little oxygen. You’re just stumbling 10 steps at a time. But eventually we got her there, got the photo, and down we went to higher oxygen levels.

Goldy Hyder:

You mentioned five sisters, three daughters, and Jennifer.

Don Lindsay:

Yes.

Goldy Hyder:

That’s a lot of women in your life.

Don Lindsay:

At one point I had a female dog and a female bunny rabbit too. Two nannies, two assistants, I was surrounded.

Goldy Hyder:

And?

Don Lindsay:

It’s all good. The reality is that… It was a funny thing. One time a reporter caught me out. He was coming for an interview, and in that sort of time when you’re walking from the elevator to the meeting room, the reporter asked me about your family.

I said, I had five sisters.

Immediately he say, “Well, you must’ve been really spoiled.”

My answer to that was always, “Well, actually I did more dishes than all five of them put together.” The moment I said it, I knew it was a mistake, and sure enough, it showed up on the front of the business section, and my sister saw this. And so then they’re emailing back and forth, and then one of the sisters said-

Goldy Hyder:

Did she challenge you on the fact?

Don Lindsay:

They were challenged and said, “How could this possibly be true?”

But then one sister said, “Well, I never did any dishes.”

And then another sister said, “Yeah, I didn’t do very many.”

Then the third sister said, “Well, I did quite a few.”

And then they both said, “Well, Mary didn’t do any.” And they said, “Oh, my God! What if it’s true,” right?

And so the solution was that they gave me an apron for Christmas that said chief dishwasher, and then we moved on.

Goldy Hyder:

Diversity is a very important value for you. I know in terms of your approach to life and your business. Do you think that’s partly impacted by the fact that you were surrounded by so many women?

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, probably because it was just normal to me. There was no big deal.

Goldy Hyder:

But you’re making efforts in your company to really bring more above-

Don Lindsay:

Well, because I believe in it. In fact, I don’t just believe in it, we see the results. It’s very male-dominated industry, no question about it. But if you see what happens, take for example, in our coal division, in 2017 for that business, we hired 800 people. 14% of the applications were women, but 29% of the hires were women. And then last year in 2018, it was 33%. And what happens is that, guess what? Safety improves, truck availability and equipment availability goes up, maintenance cost goes down, and generally more productivity, and a better work environment for all. So we’ve done very well at the front lines of the business. We’ve done very well at board level, they were 30%, they’re very talented board members.

Where it’s been tough is in the sort of direct report to me and the level down. But at our November board meeting this year, we promoted five individuals to vice president and four of them were women this year.

Goldy Hyder:

Let’s move on to Canada and our place in the world. Talk about representing Canada abroad. Talk about what you hear about Canada from others around the world.

Don Lindsay:

Well, our business is very global, very international. We have investments of some sort, sometimes just small grassroots exploration investments in 50 countries around the world. And then we have customers, of course, like China and India. We’re the largest exporter to Japan from Canada, largest exporter to Korea, our business in India has grown by 10 times in five years, and it’s going to keep going. So we get a lot of perspective, and we see how Canadians are perceived. And by and large, people are very respectful of Canada. It’s a country that they’re happy to have their families move to and immigration and so on, and it works.

I think sometimes though, we do take for granted our position in the world. And whether it be our economic position, and we have a very good position, but you still have to earn it every day. And when other countries are designing policies to attract investment, you do need to counter. You do need to respond and make sure that you remain competitive.

In a two-month period, last year, I was in Australia, China, Chile, Peru, the United States, Canada, and in addition to others. And in Australia while I was there, I watched on the front page of the newspapers the federal government was in discussions with the leading companies in Australia about if they cut taxes, would those companies invest in Australia? The Prime Minister of Peru sought me out at Davos for a project that’s about fourth on our list, and wanted to say, “How can we help?”

And then we saw the tax cuts in the United States, and we have a very high quality zinc mine in Alaska, and that tax cut was $40 million US per year, plus $100 million [inaudible 00:26:23] and all that money’s going back to the United States.

Goldy Hyder:

Are we just comfortable? Are we complacent? Shouldn’t the debate in Canada be, “How do we get our resources to market,” not, “How do we stop them from getting to market?”

Don Lindsay:

I think we’ve lost perspective. I do respect the current federal government in that they say that you can do both. And certainly we as a company at Teck are trying to develop resources in as environmentally sustainable a fashion as you possibly can. Think about with metals and minerals and [inaudible 00:26:52]. I would say this, that every single thing that we use in our life comes from one of only two sources. And if you can’t grow it, you have to mine it. You have to extract it from the earth. Now you have to do that with the smallest possible footprint that you can. You have to reuse, reduce, and recycle, absolutely. But you can’t do without it. And as we go forward in a decarbonized world, there’s going to be more electrification, and you’re going to need more copper. So we need to figure out how we can do that as sustainably as we can.

Now we, at Teck, have just been named one of the world’s 100 most sustainable companies. We actually got ranked number 37. It was announced at the World Economic Forum-

Goldy Hyder:

Congratulations.

Don Lindsay:

… because we are trying to balance these things. We just had a hearing for a new oil sands operation in Alberta. And we went through that six week hearing and we were able to get signed agreements with all 14 out of 14 indigenous groups in the area. First time that’s ever happened, when we got our permit in Chile, we had seven out of seven communities signed and seven out of seven fishermen unions signed. We got everybody.

Now, we didn’t have everybody ready at the beginning, it took a lot of dialogue. And quality of dialogue is what really count. It’s not just consultation, it’s quality of dialogue. And it takes time to build trust. People know that when they go into a community, they can’t go in with a plan. “This is a direct edict from the CEO.”

If you go into a new community, and you’ve already got a plan, you’re already on your back foot, right? You haven’t taken the time to get to know them, what their concerns are, what their history is, you need to go and just say hello, and just get to know people, and then build a plan together. And if you take that approach, it might take a bit longer. But in the end, you’re on the same page and that’s what we’re trying to get to.

I think more and more companies are doing that. I certainly see it. I’m still chair of the International Council of Mining and Metals, that’s the industry organization, the CEOs of 27 of the largest companies. And I can tell you that they’re all sharing best practices, raising the bar on a range of issues, whether it be human rights, [inaudible 00:28:49], water, air quality, and so on. So I think we’re improving, but there’s still challenges for sure.

Goldy Hyder:

You’re a very global company, and just recently you were able to pull what some people have called a coup in getting Dominic Barton, formerly of McKinsey, well-known Canadian internationally as your board chair. And he was in much demand. How did you do it?

Don Lindsay:

Well, actually, I’ve known Dominic for about 20 years from when he was in Shanghai in my previous life at CIBC when I was president of CIBC World Markets. I also had responsibility for the Asia-Pacific region. At that time, Li Ka-shing, who was the wealthiest man in Asia, owned a decent shareholding in the bank, and then China was clearly taking off. And maybe I could sort of combine CIBC’s franchise with his knowledge and build some strategy in China. And so I hired McKinsey to help us develop the strategy, and that’s when I first met Dominic. And frankly, I think he and I both thought that we’ve developed a pretty good strategy, but the bank didn’t turn out to implement it. But we stayed in touch over the years, and then about eight years ago, I got serious in recruiting him. And eventually it worked out, but we’re absolutely delighted-

Goldy Hyder:

That’s quite the courtship.

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, no, we’re delighted and I’ll tell you, he’s such a good listener. And he’s so globally connected. And he thinks laterally. And he knows the chairman runs the board of directors, the CEO runs the company, and he’s able to draw out this wisdom, and expertise, and insight from our board members, just to sort of the style that he has, and he has a natural curiosity. Think of all that he’s seen, think of the world leaders that he’s advised, including our own prime minister. He’s just a tremendous asset, and then together, guess what? He wants to do the same thing. He wants to build a Canadian champion on the world stage, so it’s very exciting.

Goldy Hyder:

You raised the issue of the relationship between a board chair and a CEO, and I think many of our listeners who are, in many cases, students in their MBA program and others probably be curious to see how does that work and how has that evolved over time.

Don Lindsay:

I’ve seen good examples and not so good examples. And I go back to my time when as president of CIBC World Markets, I used to have to make quite a few board presentations to our clients, and you can see the dynamics in the boardroom. So I’ve been very lucky to have had exposure to many chair-CEO relationships.

I think if people are clear from the beginning that, literally what I just said, that the chair runs the board and the CEO runs the company and there’s going to be a good quality dialogue and alignment, I think it can work well. When it tends to get off track is where a new chair, whether he or she has been a CEO before or not, but has a need to manage to run to operate and isn’t quite yet at that stage in life when they can step back, maybe espouse certain principles, but not have to worry about the hands-on day-to-day management or choosing team members and those kind of things. And that’s difficult for some people to do because all of these people are very accomplished. They got there somehow. They’re all type As and so many would have difficulty letting go, but I think Dominic, having been in the role that he was in, he’s pretty good at it.

Goldy Hyder:

I suspect one of the things on the board’s minds and probably your mind is disruption. How much disruption are you facing in mining, and what are you doing to make it an opportunity versus a threat?

Don Lindsay:

Well, I would say it varies depending upon what part of our industry you’re looking at. But I’ll use an example, like autonomous vehicles. We’re all hearing about that and expecting it to sweep through society. It may take a few years longer than people think, but it’s not taking longer in our business that we are rolling out autonomous haul trucks. And these are the trucks that are the size of a house. They can carry anywhere from 240 tons to 400 tons per load. If you stood beside the tire, the tire would be more than twice your height. And we have these things running in British Columbia and Alberta, our new mine in Chile is going to have nothing but autonomous trucks there, and it’s kind of scary to watch. But one of the things we’ve learned is that not only they’re more productive because there’s no shift change or lunch or washroom break, they’re lower maintenance costs, much longer tire wear. There’s no aggressive drivers driving over sharp rocks.

And then here’s the thing about sustainability in the footprint. That once you realize that there’s no driver on the truck, you don’t have to have that human margin of error in terms of the width of the road that you have for the trucks. So now you have a narrow road, that means you’ll have a steeper pit wall. When you have a steeper pit wall, that means to access the same amount of copper, you don’t have to move hundreds of millions of tons. So that’s a smaller footprint, which is what everybody wants. So this is going to have a real impact on our industry. It will, in some cases, displace currently pretty high-paid truck drivers, but we’re implementing it right now and guaranteeing that nobody loses a job, and we’re retraining them, re-skilling hopefully with success combined with some turnover. But what it does do is it protects jobs. So in this particular copper mine in BC, we may, over time, lose 100 jobs but will preserve 900 jobs for another 15 years that otherwise would’ve been lost when the mine closed down. So, well, we’ll see.

Also, we have fleets of drones going everywhere, we have sensors, we have remote sites and integrated operating center that’ll be in Santiago in Chile instead of at 14,000 feet elevation. And 14,000 feet elevation is pretty tough working environment, so to move those 250 jobs down the hill to a nice city and great working environment, there’s a lot of things changing in our industry.

Goldy Hyder:

You’ve been very active in your community. Teck itself is one of the corporate social responsibility leaders, I would say. And you’ve been recognized for that. Speak to us about the passion for philanthropy. Where does it come from?

Don Lindsay:

Well, I think you learn some of these things growing up and watching how your parents act, I suppose. And then at different times in your life, a certain moment will occur when all of a sudden you realize you can make a difference, and it feels good, and you get passionate about it. And then sometimes, by good luck or coincidence, an opportunity will present itself that is a little bit life-defining. And in my case, whether it was the opportunity to chair the campaign for BC Children, BC Children’s Hospital, and then all of a sudden you realize this is something that I believe in, seeing the impact it can have. And it was something that really aligned with Teck’s values, and so many communities in British Columbia depended on the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver because they had the mandate to take care of all 1 million children in BC, whether it was grandmothers in Kamloops or people in Sparwood or other towns that we had lots of employees, they really wanted to be a part of it.

But the most exciting one of all, and this is something that the whole company, whether you work in the copper division, the energy division, or the Zinc division was the Zinc Saves Kids program. And that one came about was a surprising thing that there was a group called the Copenhagen Consensus run by a fellow named Bjorn Lomborg, a really smart group of people, got Nobel Prize winners and so on. And every couple of years they published this list of what would be the single most effective investment the world could make to make the planet a better place.

And this one year, I think it was 2008, they said zinc and vitamin A, like the micronutrient zinc and vitamin A. It wasn’t carbon, it wasn’t AIDS, it wasn’t malaria, all the different things, it was zinc. And they said that if you could get zinc to all these sub-Saharan African countries, to the kids there, and in different Southeast Asian countries, that over time the average IQ of the country would actually increase. And the reason is because zinc promotes brain development in children under the age of two. And the sad news is that at the time, about 450,000 children under the age of five we’re dying every year of zinc deficiency.

And so I’m sitting there, I just become chair of the International Zinc Association, we’re the third-largest zinc producer in the world, and you think, “Now that you’ve learned this, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wait until you’re 85 years old and look back and not have done something?” So then you think, “Well, what are we going to do? What do we do? How do we do it?” And we ended up partnering with UNICEF. And UNICEF, they took about a year-and-a-half to check us out, make sure we were good people, but they were our people on the ground who could go into these countries and educate the mothers about the value of zinc.

And you know what the children were dying of is actually diarrhea. And more kids die of diarrhea than malaria and measles and AIDS combined. But if you can get them a course of 14 zinc tablets that cost 2 cents each not only cures that instant of diarrhea, it sets them on a healthier trajectory, and promotes brain development, reduces stunted growth, and generally makes the world a better place.

So now we started that off in about 2010, and we’ve now reached 44 million children around the world in Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, large programs in India, and I’ve gotten to go visit some of these things in India last year, in Kenya, I’ll tell you like this.

I went out to see a nursing station and this nurse who was running it. And she was like one of those battle axe grandmothers who ran the nursing station, and she took me by the hand and showed me the zinc corner where they took all the records. And at the last minute, she invited 10 mothers who brought their babies whose lives had been saved, and they each told their story. And about seven of them only spoke Swahili, about three spoke broken English. Everybody was bawling their eyes out, including me.

And then at the end, they all started handing me their babies. And I was the only Teck person. There was no one else to witness it, but they did take some pictures. I have a picture on my desk, this classic photo that reminds me every day of just what you can do to make an impact if you put your mind to it. We’ve now reached in total around the world, in terms of our food fortification program, another 100 million people.

We did a joint venture with BASF that Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, came to announce it with us jointly because he liked to see the private-private partnership. We talk about private-public partnerships, but this is a private-private partnership where we were the catalyst and the zinc provider and they were able to distribute it so that’s been pretty special.

Goldy Hyder:

Chance to do a lot of good.

Don Lindsay:

That’s the biggest thing I’ve done in my life. It certainly will be. When I’m 85 and look back, that’ll be one I’m most proud of.

Goldy Hyder:

You’re also a big supporter of WE and WE Day, tell us about that and why you chose them.

Don Lindsay:

Yeah, we’ve been really impressed with Craig and Mark and what they’ve achieved in, and so much benefit to young people and motivating them early on in their lives to make giving back just a part of how they live.

So I go in and tell the Zinc Saves kids story, but I actually have to go and speak to these 20,000 kids in the big arenas, and it’s most terrifying speaking engagement of my whole year. Especially if your own daughters are in the crowd with their friends and [inaudible 00:39:55], “Don’t screw up dad.”

But what I do is I hold up a AA battery, just one AA battery, and I say, “If you will bring us your batteries, three good things will happen. First, we’ll keep those batteries out of landfill. Second, we will recycle every single element of that battery and make it into something new. And third,” and then I hold the battery up and I say, “there’s enough zinc in this one battery to save the lives of six children, and we’ll make sure that happens.”

Well, the kids, they go on collections up and down the street, we’ve now received over 2 million batteries either directly to Teck or into different collection agencies in different provinces. It’s been very impactful.

Goldy Hyder:

That’s a great example of the power of good message and people. I know you’re a chair and you mentioned earlier about a global mining association, and you’ve shared with me your experiences and the exposure you received to social media through that. You’re not an active social media user yourself, I think, but you’ve really appreciated social media. Tell us about that.

Don Lindsay:

That’s a true statement. I’m not active myself. I vaguely follow my kids, of course, but I think what we’ve learned-

Goldy Hyder:

Well, the girls are listening, now they know.

Don Lindsay:

I know more than they think I know. But they’re doing great. Whether it’s the Business Council of Canada, whether it’s the International Council of Mining and Metals, Business Associations, large businesses, the way we get our message out is changed. We’re often very good in the intellectual content, but we’re not very good at the delivery and parsing out the audience and who needs to hear what so that it’s impactful, so that people absorb the message, and the messages have to be shorter. And they have to be delivered in a user-friendly way if we want people to understand key points that are so vital to our economic health as a country, to the success of companies, to continued employment, to good community investment, all these things. And so it’s something that I kind of believe that we all have to raise our game if we want to be impactful at the end. And so that’s one of the things I talk about for BCC going forward, that our style of communication has to keep up with the world if we want to be effective.

Goldy Hyder:

One thing we do, Don, when we wrap up the show here, is just a little wordplay. I say a word, and you just say what comes to your mind.

Don Lindsay:

All right.

Goldy Hyder:

Family.

Don Lindsay:

My very being. That’s not one word, but that’s how I feel about it.

Goldy Hyder:

It’s okay. Everybody cheats.

Mining.

Don Lindsay:

Vital.

Goldy Hyder:

Banking.

Don Lindsay:

Necessary.

Goldy Hyder:

Marathons.

Don Lindsay:

Determination.

Goldy Hyder:

I was hoping you weren’t saying fun.

CEOs.

I didn’t realize that one would stump you.

Don Lindsay:

That stumped me. What do I say about CEOs? Still people.

Goldy Hyder:

Canada.

Don Lindsay:

My passion.

Goldy Hyder:

Thanks for doing this, Don. Really appreciate it.

Don Lindsay:

Thank you, Goldy.

Goldy Hyder:

Thanks again to Don Lindsay for being my guest on this episode of Speaking of Business. Subscribe now for more conversations with Canada’s top innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Search Speaking of Business wherever you find podcasts or visit speakingofbiz.ca, that’s biz with a Z, to join our email list and follow us on social media. Until next time, I’m Goldy Hyder.