 We're about to begin an interview with Sandy Laird. It is September 2, 2015. We are in Vancouver and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McRae. So, could you please state your full name to begin? My full name is Alexander Morris Laird, and I don't use the Alexander except for very official reasons. Sandy is what anybody knows me as. And could you please give us your age? 81. And where were you born? I was born in Invermere, British Columbia. Invermere was a small rural town of about 500 people of about that time. And we lived on a farm out of Invermere, so I was never around big cities or other people very much in my youth. So what did you do in your youth over your interests? Well, we had the farm and it was a money losing proposition as many farms were. So my father was a logger and a Christmas tree farmer and worked in mining, and I grew up helping on the farm. Right from a very early age, I was part of the farming family and I grew up learning how to do hard work and how to work as a team. And I really enjoyed it because I felt I was an adult at that point when I might have only been 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years old. So it was all farming activity that I was involved in in the early years. Okay. Any, just one. Okay, so was there any, as a child, any interest in science? Not originally because I was all focused on farming and I was mainly focused on horses packing. There was going to be an outfitter and guide, that was my objective. I certainly wasn't going to be a farmer because I could see that wasn't ever going to be a profitable proposition. And I never really got interested in going to university or a further career until I was probably about 11 or 12, grade 11 or 12. And then the opportunity came. We had a very small school. There was two grades in each room and I think there was 8 of us graduated from high school. And I was the only one at that time that went through the university. There had been others before me but... Sorry, what were your strengths or interests at school? I would think science and mathematics and biology. Those were the basic subjects were my strengths because that was all that was taught. In fact to get into school I had to, in the university I had to take three correspondence courses in order just to get out of high school with a graduation for university entrance. And that was Latin and typing and art I think. But they gave me the credits I needed to get into UBC. And what did you get into UBC? I got into first year arts and science because if you had grade 13 you could go straight into engineering or further into the arts and science faculty. But I had to use that sort of grade 13 equivalent as first year arts and science. And that gave me sort of a first introduction to university life and the various occupations and careers that were available which at that time were really very limited. You know there was only three or four thousand students at UBC. The veterans had all left and there wasn't very many options that were available to go through. Obviously there was geology and some of the science options. Biology was another one I thought of in medicine. But I had never really worked or met professional people so I didn't really know what a professional person really did. So that first year gave me an opportunity to kind of figure it all out. And from there I went into engineering because that gave me two more years to make a final decision. During that time I'd had a little bit of exposure to mining and geology and exploration during my summer years and surveying and civil engineering on road work. So I thought probably either geology or engineering. But after two or three summers in exploration I thought that was enough backpacking for me and it was going to be a very unstable life. And all summers backpacking in the bush that was before helicopters and all winter sitting in an office writing reports. So when there finally came time in engineering to make a decision for the final two years I just at the last minute changed one into mining. By that time I'd had some exposure to working in a mine and so that seemed to be the obvious alternative. And I kind of liked the lifestyle of a mining engineer. It looked good. And what would you consider to be your first job in that? Well the first job in mining was when I was 16. I got a job at a very small mine that was operating not far from our farm. It was seven or eight miles. And my dad had worked there twice over the years. My uncle worked there. It was a small 70 ton a day mine. And I worked in the mill and in the crushing plant on road blasting. I had an introduction to drilling and blasting. It just seemed like a nice fit. I kind of enjoyed the people I worked with and I felt like I was an adult and I was treated as an adult. So that was my first opportunity to see what a mine was and how it worked. But it was a very small mine. Yeah, 70 tons a day. 70 tons a day. Yeah, it's pretty small. From here can you just give us kind of a rough outline of your career and from there we'll dig deeper. During my summers I had mining exposure at the Mineral King Mine and up in the Kootenays, also not far from where I lived. And at Britannia I worked underground at Britannia. So I got my mining experience there. When I graduated I couldn't find a job in mining. There was a downturn in the industry. And I keep talking to the students nowadays about the same problem that's going to happen every 10 years. There's going to be a downturn. And it's counter cyclical for the students because they're all coming in because of the last upturn. So they have to just stick with it and I found the same thing. I spent the first two years after graduation I had six different jobs. Each one collapsed because of lack of funding or closing of a mine. So at least half of that two year period was spent working for two exploration companies, one in northern BC and one in southern BC. So eventually I was working at a small mine at the end of that period that closed because of the economy. And I was hired at the Craigmont Mine which was just under development at that time in Merritt by Placer Dome. That was 1960 and that started my career with Placer. And I spent 39 years with Placer, worked at a number of mines as an operator, superintendent, manager and eventually came into the office doing project work and eventually tied my project experience and mining experience together on the mine in Nevada. And from there on after that I was really almost entirely on project work for the rest of my career. As a project manager? As a project manager, as a general manager, as vice president of project development. As a senior vice president and eventually as an executive vice president for the company. And I retired as an executive vice president which projects was only one small part of my exposure at that point. At that point I was returning back into mine operations and managing on a global basis. So what about project management? Because it's a tough job from what I hear. It's also not just managing a project. I've also been told it's being a marriage counselor, it's being a social worker. You're absolutely right. Can you tell me a bit about the good and the bad, the hard and the easy? Whether you're in there as a project manager or whatever level you're at, you're really managing people. The people you're managing are managing other people and eventually that whole thing results as the project management. So it is a team and so the key factor in my mind is to understand that all the other people that are reporting to you really know their business. That's why they're there. And they have the responsibility to look after their side of the business. And as a person who is not necessarily that familiar with any one of the key parts of a project, the project manager should sort of stand back and make sure the team as a group works together, that they interrelate together, they're getting the right advice, they're making the right decisions. And that the whole project is going smoothly. When there's personal disruptions, you have to resolve that. When you have, as you mentioned, marriage problems, you have to resolve that. You have a lot of problems to resolve within joint venture relationships. And that was a large part of my activity being the manager of various projects was to be on top of the joint venture relationships. We could have one joint venture partner or we might have two or three and in a couple of them they were governments. And so you had to know that those people had their own agendas and you had to accommodate their own agendas and still manage the project as a whole for the common benefit. So we had to learn how to compromise and we had to learn where not to compromise. And that was the tricky part. And were there any, throughout your career, were there any standout jobs or projects that you did that you thought just they were pretty dysfunctional? No, I thought we were always in a position where we had a good functional team. Obviously on some of the projects there would be little pockets where there might be a problem that you could resolve somehow. And usually there was some issue that was creating that whether it was just two personalities or whether one person was too weak for that particular role or whether they had a different agenda. So you'd have to address those but those were never, none of them ever got to the point where they were going to jeopardize the project at all. They were just things they had to manage. And finally in my whole career the only place I ever had a dysfunctional relationship was for I think three years I was assigned to the Placer Pacific Group in Sydney, Australia. They were a division of the company and just at the same time there were some management changes going on in Placer as well as that particular operation. I was over there to oversee the construction of two or three projects that ultimately came to pass. One in particular was why I went over there. And I think the person that was running that part had ambitions of his own and looked at me as a particular threat. We always had a reasonably cordial relationship but it was most of the time rather strained. And it was only because of other people in the company that I actually was able to stick it out and stay with the company. But that was probably the only time in my career and I look back now and kind of chuckle about it. I'm not sure what position he has on it but that would have been a difficult time. It was really a difficult time. I learned from that when you're at a senior level in a corporation, make sure there's continuity in the senior management roles. Make sure you know why people have been sent before you were involved to a particular project. Make sure you understand where people have come from who have been put into different situations. Because had somebody been on top of that, that would never have been a problem. When working on those different projects and locations, were there any recurring social problems like violence or substance abuse, things like that? I don't think I would emphasize any of them. The alcohol is always a little bit of a problem everywhere. And particularly on a project basis where you've got a lot of construction people involved and people who come and go and aren't necessarily part of your social fabric. So they have different philosophies and moralities and so on. But alcohol, I can remember, was never really a problem to us. There were places, for instance, in Chile where drinking would, after hours, could contribute to people running off the road, driving home to work. So you had to address that. There was violence, or the potential of violence in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where we were working within a rather violent tribal culture. And the violence there really was inter-tribal rather than with respect to us. But there were times that the frustrations were directed at us, so we had to kind of manage that. I don't think anybody's life was ever in danger, but the risk was there, so we managed it. Drugs, interestingly, was never an issue. But then, of course, they were so illegal that we wouldn't have identified that, probably anyway. But later, after I left the company, I was a director of two or three companies, and I noticed there that people were starting to put together programs to handle drug addiction. Rather than firing people who had drugs or were maybe under the influence, they simply told them to go home. And when they were ready to come back to work under a different environment, their own personal environment, they would be readily accepted. And they would be put right back on their original job in the same camp and the whole thing. But they couldn't do it a second time, because then they would perhaps lose their job. And so they were given a whole lot of help, support, and so forth during that transition period, giving the people an opportunity if they were just recreational drug users to avoid them, or if they were real heavy duty drug users to get them into treatment if they wanted it. So that was the closest I ever got to the drug addiction side. So you had mentioned Chile, Papua New Guinea. You've worked pretty much all over the world. Could you talk to us a bit about the difference of operating a mine in Canada versus the rest of the world? Or maybe not necessarily just the rest of the world, but what are the big differences between specific projects you've had, or Canada, and other outside projects? Well, first of all, Canada isn't a monolithic group either, because trying to develop a mine on the west coast of British Columbia is quite different than trying to develop one in, say, Nunavut or Saskatchewan, because of the cultural problems you come up with or challenges. But when working overseas, I think the first thing that comes to mind is what kind of a government are you going to be dealing with, because ultimately that's where the people's responsibility lies, is with their government to manage what we are doing. So you have to look at the governments and determine whether they are legitimate, whether they are accepting of you as an investor in a Western sense. You have to look at their regulations, because that can be a very questionable area. How good are their regulations, and are they accepted by people like the World Bank and the IMF and so forth? And how much freedom governments and their employees have to override or change or modify or act, not in accordance with those regulations? So that's a big question, and you really have to answer that by asking other people, but you have to ask people who have been in the same position and try and determine whether they were the subject of these problems or the cause of these problems, because lots of times you can go and think that the government has acted improperly, but you might find that, well, they really had a legitimate problem. So governments are the first thing. The social structure is the second thing, because you have to work within that society. They have strong cultural differences compared to us in many cases. Those cultural differences may look initially as being quite acceptable to deal with or quite easy to deal with, but when you start to get in it and you start to find out little things that happen pretty soon, these cultural differences really can dominate and can be a way for the people to represent that they are not getting what they thought they were going to get from you. Do you have any examples of cases that were very difficult to deal with where you had to be very involved and concerned with the society in those areas? And do you have also examples of where it was a lot easier than you thought? I think the hard one would have been Porca in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, because there we were working with a culture, a tribal culture, that was only one generation removed from first contact with whites. The first contact in that area was in the late 1930s. There was none during the war, and then the next contact was after the war, and we were there 20 or 30 years later. And these were people back in that area who had very little opportunity to interact with whites, and so you had to accept those cultures. And the cultures were quite difficult to deal with at times. One was the culture towards property, one was a culture towards women, one other one would have been the culture that said, this is our tribal area that you are on and you won't cross it without paying us or being part of a local settlement and please don't settle with the other people because they are our opposition. So that was a whole society of people who you really had to deal with as if they were the first time they had ever dealt in a business like way with anyone. Luckily, we had some very good exploration geologists working up there under the very capable management of Jeff Handley and Peter Bradshaw. They were both hands-on people who were able to understand those issues and manage them. That was probably the most difficult, and it got more difficult as time went on because as part of the project we were going to have to put in infrastructure. We had to build roads, we had to build bridges and get power in, we had to develop water systems and so on. And all of these had to come from many, many miles, hundreds of miles away. And the deal was that we were paying our taxes and the government was going to put in the infrastructure and obviously we put in the basic infrastructure. But when the taxes went to the central government and the money didn't start showing up as improved infrastructure, then we got the blame. And so we were able to manage our way out of that by a fellow there whose name was Vic Bots and he developed the idea that we would develop a relationship with the government and we would say we would build this infrastructure and deduct it from the taxes. And that's how it was all resolved. And as a result, the infrastructure was put in place. We got some credit for it, but the local politicians also got credit for it so everybody benefited and that was a solution for that. I think the nice surprise that we had was that I had was in Chile. We went down to Chile when Pinochet was still in power and because of his regime, if you wish, in foreign investment had not been made, not very much of it anyway during that time. But we went down, one of the first to come down and develop a new mine and we did. We took over a project that TVX was developing for their guidance and Ian Telfer was the gentleman in charge of it. Ian Telfer is now head of Bill Corp. And I was really surprised how comfortably we fitted in with the rest of the groups down there in an atmosphere where there was, you know, you get martial law at night and you had a lot of those kinds of problems that you had to contend with but the people were generous and hard-working and they were very, very competent. Far more than I had imagined being a South American country that at that time was not really on top of the world economies. It had slid backwards a little bit and I was very impressed with the way the Chilean people came into the company and worked with us. Fun question, what was your favorite place to work or even favorite place you visited? That's a hard one. I really think Papua New Guinea because of the challenges and because you were seeing the evolution of a culture from the Stone Age culture into a modern culture within a generation or two and to see the differences that it could make in different people moving from one society to the other and seeing how the impact that we or any other investor or group would be making in that evolution and how easy it would be to make mistakes that would be very costly not only to yourself but also to the society you're in. That was really, it would be the subject of books if someone could sit down and study it. There have been a number of studies done on it that have been published. So that was, I wouldn't say it was fun as much. It was just a tremendous experience. The country was raw and new and the topography is terrific. It would be a great tourist country if they could ever sort of get their tourism act together. So that would have been my favorite. Now back to your work at Place or Dome. You were often involved with the design and the construction of the mines as well not only project manager. Can you tell me examples of specific successes you've had in the design and the construction of mines? If there are some that come to mind. Some you're proud of. Well I think the two that I would be the most proud of would be the Borgera project in Papua New Guinea and the Zaldívar project in Chile which is just east of Antifagasta. The recurring theme here. The Borgera project because it was such a difficult job bringing that resource to the point where it could justify the development of a mine. Initially it looked like it was a pretty good project but when you really looked at it in pre-feasibility work it couldn't possibly justify all the infrastructure the cost of building and putting in place the plant itself the difficulty of finding power and water and so forth. It had to be a much, much bigger project and we worked closely with the exploration people saying to them here is what we really need to have. On this case you brought us this many ounces of gold but we needed 10 times or 20 times that amount of gold at a better grade maybe than you have. So we need a deposit that is much bigger because of this cost of infrastructure and so forth and we went back and forth on that for a year or two and they did some tremendously good exploration work and actually found what they thought was there all along a high grade core which we could start on and that triggered the whole thing. So although I didn't have a role in the exploration side of it I was party to the discussions that led to that and I feel pretty good that we took the right approach and we didn't move into trying to develop something that was clearly not economic at the time even though everybody believed there was a bigger resource there than there was. And that was solely gold? Solely gold. I can't remember the numbers but I think we needed they had a million and a half or two million ounces of gold which was pretty good. Eventually I think we developed it on about 10 million ounces and now they're produced more than 20 million. Are they still operating? Yeah. And they've just sold half of it to a Chinese company, my company. So that was and then the impact that we made in the communities the impact that it's made to the development of Papua New Guinea it's you know you can question how those governments spend their money but nevertheless they have the opportunity to use it and use it correctly so I felt that that one was a good one. Solely was our second project in Chile and there was some new technology in that as well. I wasn't responsible for the new technology but our project team with the assistance of our joint ventures partners were involved in that. That was a big project that went in on budget and it went in under the time that we were given it and it has continued to produce exceptionally well over the years. I like that one because of the size of the project the water requirements the power requirements the transportation requirements and some of the technical requirements that made it all work in the plant so I think that was a good mine and it still is. And that's another one that Barrick has because they acquired Placer Doleman they've sold half of that to Antifogastom and also obviously Antifogastom controls paid a billion dollars for half of it so it certainly was a good mine. We'll switch the topics a little bit. You seem to be very supportive of youth and you've been a mentor to... I've heard personally for some people for example Joe Ringwald on this morning himself told me he considered you quite a mentor I also heard you were a mentor to Jim Gowans he had mentioned that as well. What kind of initiatives have you developed for youth in the industry? I don't think I ever did it consciously so to be called a mentor that's a real compliment because I've never considered being a mentor but what I have always enjoyed was seeing young people develop to their full potential I was given that opportunity being a farm kid who didn't know what he was going to do ended up developing way beyond anything I ever imagined could be possible because somebody gave me an opportunity and I've always enjoyed seeing people grow within their capabilities and then see them grow their capabilities and we tried to develop that attitude within our project group and also within our mining operations where if you had an opportunity available don't look just for the person who had the experience look for someone who could develop within that opportunity and he should also be a candidate and trying to move people as long as you had the openings and that's one of the big problems in business you can't always have the openings to move people into so it's a case of trying to give everybody the best opportunity that you can give them and often that can be done by cross training asking someone how would you like to do this this is totally outside your field but you're so good at this we have an opportunity here how about you going over there and trying that usually the reaction is well I really can't do that I mean I've done the same thing myself I said no I couldn't do it but in most cases when you tell the person you think they can do it you know they can do it you should really try it and you don't know where that will take you from there most people will accept it and if you're good at what you're doing you can pick people who you know aren't going to fail or you can work with them so you know they won't fail the other part of that is to have a culture and I think we were fortunate in the placer to have that culture the process of learning is also a process of making mistakes and people should be allowed to make their mistakes you can tell somebody a hundred times not to do something or there is a way to do something but everybody including myself is going to do it but when you've done it then you shouldn't be allowed to do it the second time but you sure will remember when you've done it you won't probably repeat it so the learning process is almost a case of trial and error as people go through life no matter what you tell them and you have to kind of understand that people are going to make mistakes I've got lots of examples of people making mistakes that we could have fired or some other cultures would have fired but we said no we're not in these cases we won't do that we learned from operators, equipment operators right through the vice presidents yeah were you ever involved with students in lectures or classes? yes I was after I retired well before I retired I was invited to participate in setting up the industry advisory committee out at UBC mining at that time it was a mining department faculty of applied science and so Saralas got together and I was asked to chair the group so I did that for three or four years and then I retired and simultaneously I dropped off of that responsibility but then I was asked would I like to quote there as a lecturer so after a lot of debate I said okay I would I didn't really feel that I was an authority on the subject we were lecturing so I developed a program where I had a different lecturer every week coming in from Placer Dome so Placer participated in this and we went through the whole project development process as a course in fourth year mining engineering right from exploration right through to financing and we had different specialists in our group come in and talk each week and I was just really the facilitator so I've been told that I've I was the person who was doing it but I wasn't it was the other people who were doing it but the students really liked it and even now I run into them other than different events like a mining AGM at the CIM and they'll come up and say oh gosh do you remember that course that you taught and they'll say how good it was so that I found really exhilarating in many ways I can see how people can enjoy being teachers or lecturers and what they take away from it when they see students move through this and become learning become their own people so you said you're quote-unquote retired but that's the recurring theme in this business is that a lot of people say they're retired but not actually fully retired what do you do now? well I am fully retired I retired finally was it two or three years ago so that was my last paycheck was about two years ago three years ago and so now my involvement is really trying to clear up my life's accumulation of problems excuse me and I do stay involved at the university a little bit I have an award two awards that I give out there every year and from there I mentor the recipients and I mentor them through their subsequent three years in the mining program and interestingly they stay in touch most of them stay in touch afterwards even the first one which was 12 years ago still writes emails and tells me what he's doing sometimes now I used to buy them lunch now sometimes they're buying me lunch but I really enjoy seeing how these kids who come in in second year mining how they've evolved through their three years of schooling and all the work in the field during their work terms and then go on into business and become managers and consultants and influential people in the industry so it's quite interesting but that's really the only contact I have now with the mining excuse me I'm going to have to get rid of this yeah sure take your time you might have to edit all out now with your fairly recent experience working at UBC and comparing that to when you first went to school is there a big difference in the attendance of women in those departments yeah there is because well first of all when I was in UBC in mining there was only four students so it was a pretty small group I don't know just when women started to appear in the mining engineering department but it must have been 20 years ago 25 years ago and I don't know what the percentage is at the moment but it's probably in the order of 15 to 20 percent and I think there's room for more the problem that we've had over many years is the there was a traditional attitude in the mining industry that women underground in a mine was bad luck now where that ever came from who knows so that it was very very rare for women to go underground I know that there were women who went underground as visitors in the 30s because my father in law was a mine manager and he took women underground the first time I ran into a woman in the mining industry working underground was in West Virginia in a coal mine that we were looking at and there was a couple of women came out on the shift change of shift that would have been in the 19 late 1970s prior to that I think we were employing our first women in Gibraltar mine up here near Williams Lake as truck drivers of course there was always women in the clerical side but not in the trades and not in the operating side so they first appeared as truck drivers and what we found was they did extremely well in fact women as truck drivers on that very repetitive job of just going around and around from the shovel to the dump they seemed to be able to stand the boredom and monotony of that a lot better than men can men would get themselves into all kinds of problems they're more patient they're far more patient so they seemed to be a little bit more mature particularly at the younger ages you know in 17, 18, 20 they're more mature the first woman I was involved with at a professional level was at Porgar she was a manager she had been a mine manager in Australia and she came up and managed the pressure oxidation plant which was a new and very expensive and very technically challenging operation and she was a manager of it and she worked there for two or three years I think and she was exceptionally good when she left there she came to the office in Vancouver here in the project group and then went to Campbell the Campbell Mine as an assistant manager and then became the mine manager this is a big underground mine we had in Ontario when the mine manager was away for several months and so she had a bit of a career she could have been a full blown mine manager she could have gone right into the vice president's level but this is one of the problems you sort of have to develop procedures for at least a culture to accept that she married and left and went overseas and delivered with her husband and dropped right out of the mining business so I guess men can do that too but it is the women that I've had I've had a number of them win my award and in the mentoring process I've asked them what are you going to do are you going to handle your family commitments when you have a family and so on and they do have still a problem trying to juggle family commitments child commitments particularly on fly and fly out operations where they're away for seven days seven days at a time and back in town for seven days and with a husband who's working somewhere else so there's a huge amount of work to be done on trying to make the or develop a plan to accommodate women who have the ability and skill and the desire to work in the industry and yet still has to they still have to adjust to the way the industry has grown up and how it's being managed and there's no doubt in my mind that women can work at all levels in the industry completely and do just as well and we've got many examples in Canada where women have moved into the senior executive roles as of a mining company and I'm talking about not HR operations and CEO roles so they can certainly do it there's a few big ones here and we had and aside from the one I spoke of we had another girl who was a lady who was an exceptionally good metallurgical engineer and she had worked up in the consulting business to a vice president level and came in I think her role was a vice president might have been a manager of metallurgical work in our project group and she eventually left and went and did something else too but it seems that we don't really have the ability to manage people's lives changes something that happens to change fast enough we had the same problem with just moving families from one environment to say a new mine in another country in a rural environment or even an urban environment with fly and fly out they we never really developed ahead of time how we were going to manage the families and their children and the education and all of the commitments that the families would have to get into what their roles were going to be as support roles I mean after the fact we were doing it but we didn't plan ahead for your opinion on I guess the broader subject that is the natural resources industry according to you do you think there is a specific if there's specific people specific events disasters contributions advancements in the natural resource field that need to be mentioned when we talk about the natural resources in Canada I think the obvious one is how do we manage the relationship between the federal government and the provincial government and their various responsibilities for project approvals and how do we manage the other areas where special interests have a right for instance the Aboriginal rights that have just been dictated by the Supreme Court I think the mining industry more than any other industry has worked with the Aboriginal people more in that regard over the past 20 years and have a track record to show for it has not always worked in every case but we have a lot of cases our own cases could be an example where that relationship has been developed out here in BC the AMBC the expiration group have made a conscious effort over the last 10 or 15 years to manage their relationship with the Aboriginal people and I think that has been very beneficial and there has been a good relationship developed but beyond that now there are with the new guidance from the Supreme Court that really has to be proactively managed in a very major way and I think the governments both levels of governments have to resolve how they in turn are going to manage their affairs the Aboriginals are developing how they are going to manage theirs the industry is trying to manage with them usually as joint venture partners or in some sort of interrelated corporate way but we still require both levels of government to act a little bit more forthrightly I think here a little bit more adeptly perhaps maybe a little more quickly there's no reason why we can't act quickly because when you come to investing money you're investing billions of dollars and you have to invest maybe hundreds of millions up front you've got to have some better assurance than what we're sort of getting normally in order to make that preliminary investment and there's a good room for improvement I think between federal and provincial jurisdictions there I think the relationship with the original groups is developing and I think it's developing in a healthy way and I support it wholeheartedly I would like to see the governments come on a little more proactively I think okay thank you a couple questions this may be tough for a second split it in two what are you proudest of in life so it can be in general in life and also a bit professionally well I think I'm proud of the fact that during my whole career I've worked towards developing projects that have made a contribution to society in other words I think I've left sure we've made a mess here and there and we've had a few stumbles and we've had a few accidents but in general I think we have improved people's lives one way or the other wherever we've been and I think if you can do that no matter what field you're in if you can sort of fade out of the picture thinking well perhaps because of what we've done over the past few years some people's lives are better then I think you've made your mark it's a very difficult thing to try and manage that sort of impact proactively ahead of time without actually seeing it from the perspective that I'm in I can see it now at the time you didn't think you were really doing that but everywhere we've been we've created towns, we've created investment, we've created employment, we've improved people's lives where children from families who were not well off could go to university and get careers of their own we could open up infrastructure, open up countries we can develop trade the whole impact of what we do is to mitigate the negative impacts and to reinforce all of the positive impacts and we're not always 100% successful in either of those but on balance I think we have done well so I'm kind of proud to say that I was all part of that okay and I've often said in fact I've said it even at a conference I attended when I was the president of CIM in the 100th anniversary years I remember saying what have you experienced most what's your take away from the whole thing and I said change I talked briefly about the fact that my first mine was 70 tons a day my last mine I worked on as an advisor to the board which I terminated my work on was three years ago was in Chile and it was 110,000 tons a day and with a potential expansion up to 200,000 tons a day so you go from 70 up to 110 to 200,000 that's and trucks that were available twin axle trucks with single engines was 27 tons and of course now that size is 350 or so so changes is constant and changes inevitable and changes accelerating and if you look at your life that's the way it's been my parents went from horse and buggy to airplanes they went from telegraph to telephones we've gone from slide rules to computers and we've gone from telephones to cell phones the change is terrific and the impact of all that requires that you constantly keep learning last question is it hard to speak to someone much younger like your old students for example what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice to give them? well I think you should govern your life and give more than you take just as simple as that you find that people who take more than they give if you really dig down that's maybe the reason they're dissatisfied that's maybe the reason they're unhappy they don't have the opportunity to give I think most people would like to be able to give more than they take very often people don't have that opportunity I've had that opportunity and it's been really rewarding if you can give more than you take then you feel you've contributed thank you is there anything else you'd like to add or share? no I'm feel very honored to be asked to participate with all these other illustrious people many of whom I know and I admire them all I've learned a lot from them Jim Cooney I've learned a lot from Jim Cooney Joe Ringmole some of Joe's opinions and attitudes I've subscribed to and I sort of came on board with a lot of those long after he was a deliverer of the message Jim O'Rourke worked with over the years and I've always had a great admiration for Jim because he's one who also gives more than he takes both fact all those people do well thank you thank you for taking time I look forward to seeing how this all turns out