When mining’s leaders no longer fit the moment: project growth lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Mining’s post-2011 austerity playbook, dominated by CFO-style leaders focused on cost-cutting, dividends and buybacks, is colliding with a structurally tighter supply environment where gold trades well above $2,000/oz and permitting and reserve replacement are slower and harder than at any point in recent decades. Erik Groves, corporate strategy lead and in-house counsel at Morgan Companies, argues that companies which kept building mines through the downturn are already outperforming more cautious peers as investors rotate to visible growth. He calls for geologists and technical project builders to regain strategic authority, balancing financial discipline with long-horizon investment in new ore bodies.
Technical Brief
- Gold is described as “well beyond” US$2,000/oz, reframing hurdle rates for long-life project approvals.
- Supply elasticity is said to have “collapsed”, with permitting and reserve replacement structurally slower than previous cycles.
- Regulatory hurdles are characterised as higher than at any point in “modern mining history”, constraining greenfield timelines.
- Exploration budgets are explicitly called “constrained”, with new project pipelines advancing only slowly despite strong margins.
- Capital allocation is skewed to dividends and buybacks, with “meaningful production growth” often deferred or deprioritised.
- Leadership profiles are contrasted: “accountants, operators, and former CFOs” versus earlier “geologist-visionaries” who drove discovery-led growth.
Our Take
The focus on leadership in a multi-commodity context (copper, gold, iron ore, lithium, nickel, rare earths, uranium) aligns with survey findings in the 22 January 2026 White & Case piece, where nearly half of respondents flagged government policy as the dominant driver of mining investment, suggesting boards now need political navigation skills as much as operational expertise.
Our database shows that most recent copper and gold coverage is anchored in brownfield expansion and technical optimisation (e.g., the 22 January 2026 University of Queensland brownfields study and the Fortune Minerals NICO hydrometallurgy work), which implies that leadership profiles optimised for incremental improvement may be misaligned with the step‑change expectations often embedded in current op‑eds.
With gold prices testing around US$2,000/oz in this op‑ed, the leadership debate is occurring against a backdrop where, in our 714 Mining stories, gold appears frequently in pieces about capital discipline and state‑backed funding, indicating that strategic decisions by executives in gold and copper now carry outsized consequences for access to public and quasi‑sovereign capital.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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