Over the past three days I have compiled a large report for a client. I was helped in this regard by two other old men, both older than me. Our clients all, were young men. Nobody from that lost middle generation was involved.
A perfect example of the problems that lie ahead for the mining industry somebody is sure to remark: all the old, experienced guys gone in the next decade and nobody in the middle to take over. How will those young kids manage when they take over?
I take a different view of the matter. The young kids are already in charge. We olders are simply sitting preening and playing. I look around at the mines I know and the I see the young in positions of responsibility. I mean the thirty-year olds. They are in charge of a running activities that my generation got to only in their fifties, sixties, or at all.
And the young are doing a damn good job. In many instances better than my generation. By the time we got to those positions, we were older, more cautious, perhaps scared by harder economic turns along the way. The young who are in charge on the mines today are still fresh, enthusiastic, energetic. Even their failings: inexperience, rashness, and impetuousness, are somehow turned by them to their benefit. They grew up confident, skilled at technologies we still avoid. One of the old guys helping me yesterday still cannot negotiate Google and was unaware of Wikipedia.
I cannot fathom how they are doing it, but the young on the mines I frequent are getting more done with less. As well they need to, for there is no doubt, there are fewer of them and they need to achieve more. But they have management systems and technologies we never dreamed off. They chat about six sigma as though it were nothing. I am still a little intimidated by so pompous a name, but they use it to achieve wonders we never did.
There is nothing miraculous about the achievements of the young in mining. For most of the 100,000 years of so we have been homo sapiens, most men did not get much past 40. Women stayed around longer, as they were valuable as grandmothers; but old men just consumed scarce resources as their bodies ached. I bet that for most of the times past, the thirty-years olds were in charge, at the most guided by one old fool who managed to remain alive past forty.
I suggest we are returning to a natural order of things: one or two wise (or powerful) men way up at the top, with the rest being done by the youngsters, and being done pretty well. That could be a description of a fly-in, fly-out mine, or of a tribe in some lost jungle.
Then there is the benefit of the fact that young women are also in or soon to enter positions of power in the mining industry. Those I have met are awesome: bright, smart, skilled. They too are but thirty. They will make things so different that we of the sixties and seventies, and eighties etc. will not know what hit us.
Thus my plea: you journalists of thin magazines, you after-bad-food-dinner speakers, you old men sitting but not running in the mining industry: drop the subject. Stop pouting and puffing that when we go, the mining industry faces a crises of people. You are wrong, drawing on your old or ignorant pride. You are relying on statistics and ignoring the human spirit, will, and ability. I say: the young will miss us for a minute, and then get on with new achievements. Mining will boom even as we bust. And I do not think the numbers count a whit. They are based on the way we fuss about things the young know how to avoid, solve, or mitigate using systems and technologies we shy away from.
My plea is that as we enter the second decade of this “new” century, we admit, that the old have a role to play, but that we will not be missed when we go away, and mining will boom on the backs of the young. Even if they make mistakes doing so.
Christ at thirty-three
