Mining is an industry that has fascinated me right from the start. If you were fortunate enough to walk the mining precinct of downtown Johannesburg in the early 2000s, you were in the midst of the who’s who of global mining.
My first client, Anglo American, was among them, and walking into their offices on Marshall Street, near the city centre, was like entering a different world, an ecosystem of bold ambitions and excellence in execution.
In the years that followed, I was fortunate enough to work with mining organisations on some of the industry’s more intractable challenges, from new strategies to connect miners and their clients in collaboration and unlocking global supply chains for minerals, to building new ventures along the energy transition and helping mines and communities work towards a shared future.
Yet, today’s challenges are some of the most complex the industry has ever faced.
One must ask the question: are we ready to navigate these challenges, as the nature of competition itself is changing, from standalone mining organisations competing for access to resources and talent, to competition between mining ecosystems?
Transforming mining & metals
Why is the basis of competition shifting at such a pace?
The Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) recently published its latest 10 Mega Trends Shaping Our Future report. In it, it outlines a transition from traditional resources to new materials and industrial inputs that will be required to meet the needs of our societies.
Such materials include not only critical metals, but smart construction materials and sustainable substances that would be needed for consumer products and green infrastructure of the future. They also include environmentally friendly fuels and, most importantly, batteries that exceed today’s energy densities by multiples.
Its 2024 edition of the Top 50 Opportunities report, the DFF highlights how mining could benefit from such changes by forming cross-sectoral partnerships (as we are seeing between automotive firms and miners) and a variety of international collaborations (such as those fueling new commodity passports, data exchanges and more).
Of the top 50 global opportunities identified in this report, 15 specifically involve mining and metals – a significant stake.
We are, in effect, experiencing an inflection point in mining, that is demanding more than greater agility in the supply of commodities. Critical metals, smart materials and high-performance batteries are drawing us into an era where we are more than a source of supply.
Michelle Ash, who served as Vice President of Growth at BHP, summed it up well: “We need to transform mining over the next 10 to 20 years,” she said. That would require more than getting comfortable with technologies that optimise today’s operations. It requires us to reimagine how industry players collaborate and compete.
Ecosystems in action
In his 1996 book, The Death of Competition, James E. Moore defined business ecosystems as cooperative structures where organisations collaborate and compete to co-evolve a needed innovation, whether the adoption of a technology or a new way of organising work, to meet critical stakeholders needs that no single organisation can fully meet on its own.
Here, we see industry incumbents working alongside non-traditional players, such as academic and research institutes, start-ups and business schools, governments and adept social players, to stay ahead. This ability to collaborate and compete across opportunity spaces is at the center of these mining ecosystems.
An example of such an ecosystem at work is provided by the Global Battery Alliance. We know that current supply chains for battery producing commodities are under strain. Whether we look at lithium, cobalt, nickel or even rare earth metals, we see simmering tensions.
In lithium, significant investments are being made in new mines and robust mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, to try and keep pace with growing battery usage. The demand for battery-grade nickel, by some forecasts, could grow 20-fold over the next 20 years, and so would graphite.
In today’s hyper-competitive world, competition is not merely about satisfying demand (the what), but doing so transparently while meeting demanding social and environmental requirements (the how).
The Global Battery Alliance was launched in 2017 in collaboration with the World Bank and 28 distinct organisations. It includes diverse role players which would be needed for this scale of collaboration.
From miners to battery manufacturers, carmakers to recyclers, and a host of public sector players. Six years later, and the alliance has grown four-fold in membership to over 120 members who, together, span the global battery value chain.
It includes diverse role players; car brands such as Audi, mining houses such as ERG and Glencore, battery component and vehicle manufacturers, such as LG, Umicore and Tesla, IT solution providers as well as leading non-governmental and international organisations. It even includes the German Ministry for Economic Affairs, Climate Action and Natural Resources Canada.
In short, it’s a collaborative ecosystem with a shared mission, to help unlock the energy transition, through robust and transparent battery supply chains.
Sizing up the opportunities
You might ask, how large of an opportunity set could this be?
A number of studies point to the significant role that ecosystems could play beyond the inflection point we experience. One notable study by McKinsey & Co. estimated the ecosystem economy could reach approximately 70 to 100 trillion US dollars, or roughly one-third of global gross economic output, across sectors over several decades.
Ecosystems are connecting industries that were once far apart and talent pools that were previously unavailable to us, or that may have seen the mining industry as unattractive to work in. Ecosystems could help solve that, and if 15 out of 50 global opportunities are anything to go by, mining’s share in these ecosystems could be sizeable.
Ready to lead?
How could companies position themselves in such growing ecosystems?
Here is where you may find mining organisations are at an advantage. One of the best predictors of successfully leading an ecosystem is the ability to demonstrate collective leadership. Here miners can leverage their deep understanding of the environment to explore what innovations are needed. They would be well placed to do so and forge a shared ambition with role-players around them.
Mining ecosystems in which shared ambitions are realised are ones where miners are also well-placed to experiment and learn, while developing a greater conviction towards a future that may be rather different to their past. The ability to look at one’s organisation from beyond the inflection point is key to this.
All are learned skills that can be practiced and brought into one’s own team as well as partners.
This is a chance to not only de-risk some of the most challenging issues facing mining organisations today, but an opportunity to partake in what is recognised as one of the most favourable roles of the 21st Century: that of ecosystem leadership.
Saar Ben-Attar is the founder of Ascent Growth Partners, a niche consultancy that focuses on strategic innovation and ecosystem-driven growth in the mining, industrial and infrastructure sectors, with offices in Johannesburg and Singapore. He is the author of Challengers: How a New Breed of Leaders Collaborates and Wins in a Hyper Competitive World, and serves as an executive fellow at the Center for the Future of Organisation, at the Peter E. Drucker School of Management. Saar contributes regularly to the UK’s Developing Leaders Quarterly magazine and PIVOT magazine, in the US.