Tag: Arjen de Bruin

Most mining losses do not come from commodity prices. Instead, they come from operational friction that compounds across every shift. Mining companies can tell you exactly what they spend on diesel, explosives or labour. They can quantify the cost of downtime, track commodity price fluctuations by the hour and model production scenarios years into the future.

In mining, the goals are clear: safety, productivity, profitability. Leadership spends countless hours developing strategies. They align KPIs and ensure plans are in place to keep the business moving forward. But on the ground, where boots hit rock, what’s planned often gets lost in translation.

With Coal & Energy Transition Day taking place this month, the discussion around sustainability and coal mining ramps up, as the sector grapples with the desire and responsibility to lower its carbon footprint – but not lose its very reason for existence.

In a South African context, ‘dignity’ is a word that is often supercharged, laden with meaning and emotion. Given our dark history where apartheid stripped whole groups of people of their dignity – and because of the prevailing gap between rich and poor, with South Africa having the highest Gini coefficient in the world – we not only have to believe in dignity, we must also strive to uphold it across all aspects of society.

In its most literal sense, return on investment (ROI) is a profitability metric that refers to the business value derived from spend. It involves dividing an investment’s profit by its cost and is generally expressed as a percentage.

It was former Colorado football coach Bill McCartney who said, “all coaching is, is taking a player where he can’t take himself.” And McCartney would know. In his 13-year tenure, he won just shy of 100 games, three Big 8s and a National Championship, earning him a well-deserved place in the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame.  Yet, within an organisational or business context, how can coaching take people where they are unable to go on their own?

Historically, the term ‘war room’ described a space that was used to strategise, discuss tactics and map out plans during battle. The war room, as a concept, is said to have been officially introduced in the early 1900s (no doubt there were many unofficial iterations dating back much further), but it first gained prominence during the first and second world wars.