Arnaud Soirat, Rio Tinto

Andrew White from Saïd Business School and Adam Canwell from EY speak to Arnaud Soirat about leading a cultural transformation at global mining company Rio Tinto.

“What was important was to get started and then to leave room for people to experiment and improve.”

In the second series of Transformation Leadership2050 Dr Andrew White and Adam Canwell meet five global leaders who have led their organisations through significant change. What can we learn from their experience of addressing turning points in the transformation?

In this episode they are joined by Arnaud Soirat, the former Chief Operating Officer at Rio Tinto, who led the global mining group through a radical bottom-up cultural transformation of the company’s mindset and behaviour.

When Arnaud was called to head up a productivity transformation, he saw that the people at Rio Tinto were its greatest untapped potential to create a new competitive advantage. And so, unlike previous transformations that had been top-down and unsustainable, Arnaud and his team inverted the pyramid and asked those on the shopfloor and actually doing the work to lead on designing a new operating model.

What does it mean to lead with this philosophy?

Featuring:

Dr Andrew White, Senior Fellow of Management Practice, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Adam Canwell, EY Oceania Workforce Advisory Leader.

Arnaud Soirat, former COO, Rio Tinto.

Resources:

• Subscribe to Andrew’s Leadership2050 Newsletter on LinkedIn

• Discover more articles, podcasts and videos from Saïd Business School on the challenges business leaders of the future need to consider on Oxford Answers

• Follow us on Twitter @Oxford_Answers

https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk

Produced by Eve Streeter for Stabl.

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