Honouring heritage and finding better ways for the future

Last updated: 14 August 2023

Jakob Stausholm, Rio Tinto’s Chief Executive Officer, spoke with James Thomson from the Australian Financial Review, at the Melbourne Mining Club.

Here are some key insights from their discussion:

On learning from history and past leaders

“There's so much to learn. If you lose your history, you kind of impair your future. You have got so much strength from the past.”

On China’s economy

“Many of us, including myself, have spent two weeks in China working at steel manufacturers and China has not wasted time during COVID the productivity improvement, the applications of technologies are massively impressive.”

On decarbonising our business

“We are both a mining and a processing company and 80% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions are actually in processing – so the key thing is to solve the emissions and processing and we're making huge technological breakthroughs.”

Connecting with communities

“We as a company, in our desire to become more efficient, became a little bit too inward looking and perhaps forgot that if you want to be successful long term in mining you have to work inside the gate and outside the gate. And we needed to put more focus on outside the gate.”

On Rio Tinto as a technology company

“Fundamentally Rio Tinto is a technology company… one of the first things I did was re-establish a chief scientist office where we're really bringing a lot of technological innovation.”

On leadership

“There's one thing I'm relentless about it's about that people must work on their own development…there's nothing more dangerous if you stop that curiosity, you're not standing still, you're going backwards…You must do everything you can to be the best of yourself.”

Reflecting on 150 years of Rio Tinto

“It’s a tall order to just extract one key strength, but I think I would call it adaptability. That ability to adjust and accept that the world is changing.”