Back in the mid-1980’s I brought together a small team that ultimately became the third largest Australian-based gold producer. You can read the long version of the story in Heroic Misadventures. But here’s an abridged version of what we did.
Building a successful corporate culture was as important as finding gold and we needed a better answer for our expanding team when they were asked: “what do you do?”. Their answer, “I work for a mining company”, didn’t really develop into a constructive conversation nor did their comment “we look for gold”.
After much thought we came up with a corporate slogan which incorporated the spirit and creativity of our fully integrated discovery, mining, production and marketing gold.
Our slogan was simply: Turning ideas into gold.
This slogan served us well for 20 years after which, for several reasons, the company lost its way due to takeovers, loss of corporate culture and mainly because the team forgot the importance of making a profit. With the wisdom of hindsight we should have added three more words to our slogan so that it read in its complete form:
Turning ideas into gold…at a profit.
No, 30 years later, I still appear the the gymnasium proudly wearing one of my several indestructible Croesus Mining t-shirts bearing the slogan. This still draws much thoughtful comment and discussion from observers.
In the image above Ron can be seen giving a bar of gold to Perth’s Judi Green (now Morrison), who was crowned Miss Australia in 1987. She didn’t get to keep the gold.