Johannesburg - Anglo American chief executive Cynthia Carroll will completely reconfigure the job of head of South African operations after two high-profile executives, Lazarus Zim and Kuseni Dlamini, quit in the space of three years.
Carroll is not saying how much time the company is giving itself for the reconfiguration. It's just one more thing on the extensive to-do list for the world's leading woman miner.
With eight or more meetings behind her by the time we meet at her Johannesburg home on Wednesday afternoon, Carroll is looking more frazzled than her Forbes poster-woman image. She is named as the wealth magazine's seventh most powerful woman in the world.
She sits with piles of files squeezed in around her on the sofa and her spectacles atop her head. Carroll's at a challenging point in her career. She faces rear-guard opposition from the Anglo old-boys club for holding onto dividends and for staring down Xstrata chief executive Mick Davis's merger proposal.
While her company is global, its wealth is still largely held in the mining seams of South Africa. Also on the line are the company's empowerment credentials because Zim and Dlamini have walked out of a job considered no more than corporate affairs geared to keep government sweet. The job carries no executive responsibilities.
Carroll has spent the week in results presentations which show the company's interims are generally precipitous (as is the entire commodities sector) but not nearly as bad as expected.
Her two-year-old asset optimisation strategy aimed at cutting costs and spotting where the next commodities boom will be has earned her a rare round of applause from the brutish British analyst community.
Another plank of her tenure has been insisting on aiming for zero fatalities and while it's not been achieved, miner deaths are down by 25%, she says, adding that many in the industry don't believe her policy of "zero harm" is achievable.
Her two years at the helm have been hard as she has altered the long-established Anglo culture.
"At the outset, I began to de-layer the organisation. I took out a layer of chairmen. We said goodbye to quite a number of people because the performance was weak or because they would not endorse the higher safety standards."
"There's an old-school Anglo club out there like Graham (Boustred) who can never accept what it is I am trying to do."
Boustred, a former deputy chairperson of Anglo, was recently quoted in Business Day saying about Carroll: "This woman's hopeless. There's no morale. Do you know why it's difficult to find a female CEO? It's because most women are sexually frustrated."
Of Boustred's comment, Carroll says: "I don't spend much time on it."
She has spent her time in South Africa in a series of damage control meetings with Mining Minister Susan Shabangu and her director-general Sandile Nogxina, who spat fire when Anglo appointed Sir John Parker as chairperson over the black candidate government pushed for.
While Cyril Ramaphosa turned down the chair because he's too busy, Nogxina complained that South Africa had a deep layer of black executives from which Anglo could have drawn.
Carroll bats away my question about whether Anglo director Mamphela Ramphele would not have been an option.
She has a deep voice and laughs regularly, "I think she's terrific, just terrific but Mamphela has a lot of other interests."
I'm not convinced, but Carroll says the job is so demanding that any chair would have to resign all other business interests as Parker has now done.
Anglo does not struggle to attract black talent, but it also loses them quickly. High- profile executives like Kaizer Nyatsumba, Douglas Ramaphosa, Delisiwe Buthelezi and Daniel Ngwepe have all started and quit within two years.
Is it because they are in demand in a black skills-starved economy like ours or because they can make a mint in their own businesses or is there a transformation problem at Anglo, I ask.
Carroll takes the easy gap, saying it's the first two reasons, adding that Anglo is ahead of the curve on transformation.
Nearly half (45%) of its management team are historically disadvantaged South Africans, though this includes white women, coloureds and Indians and may hide a lack of black African empowerment.
She's not yet succeeded in making it an African Anglo American, but an empowerment project which should take more credit is the Zimele procurement plan.
There are now 11 Zimele hubs throughout Anglo's operations in which 228 small businesses supply the various mines, creating 13 000 jobs.
While some women executives eschew gender equality programmes once they are in positions of authority, women in mining is clearly a Carroll passion.
If and when she leaves, the Anglo boss will leave behind a transformed workforce - the mining industry is a lot less macho than it used to be.
In South Africa and the UK 13 group executives are women and in most business units, the company has met its target of ensuring one in 10 employees are women.
"We're not where we need to be and everywhere I go, women want to talk to me privately. We want to up the ante here and I want to see us get to a much higher level."
- City Press