Profile FIT TO LEAD Corona Corp.’s Peter Steen

Peter Steen’s working day starts in the pre-dawn usually, but at a leisurely pace. About four or five o’clock, the lights go on in the condominium he shares with his wife Norma and 20-year-old son along Toronto’s largely upscale, condo-row waterfront. Into the den of the 17th- floor apartment he strides, book in hand, and slips into a chair to indulge his fancy for history or bone up on management theory. By seven, the level of activity cranks up several notches during his regular workout at the downtown Adelaide Club, where other Corona executives are usually sweating through their company- sponsored memberships as well. Muscle tone and work performance go hand in hand, Steen believes. This simple principle has worked well. His career began in the depths of a South African gold mine as a trainee official. At 57, the trim, disciplined engineer with his close-cropped hair and military-issue moustache is at the top of his profession — the president and chief executive officer of Corona Corp., Canada’s latest big-league gold company. Anthony Kana, Cassiar Mining Corp.’s current vice-president, finance, was that company’s secretary-treasurer back in the early 1970s when Steen w as appointed Cassiar’s president. He recalls that Steen was “quite a hard-nosed, efficient” manager and an ardent jogger, whose laps near his Vancouver home weren’t merely recreational. “If it took him more than the allotted time (Steen clocked his runs) to cover the usual distance, he was not the happiest man in town,” says Kana.

He was also struck by Steen’s unconventionality. One sunny day in Vancouver, he found his neighbor Steen, the well-to-do president of a substantial company, up a ladder painting his own house.

Of course, Steen’s climb up the corporate ladder wasn’t exclusively a matter of physical fitness and a willingness to do menial tasks. People who know him well, like Gil Leathley who worked with Steen in Zambia (formerly northern Rhodesia) and at Cassiar in northern British Columbia, say Steen is good with people. “He expects a lot, but helps you achieve it.” Leathley is currently Corona’s senior vice-president, operations. Peter Bedford, mine manager at Rio Algom’s Panel mine, has known Steen since 1968 when the two worked together at Rio Algom’s Anglo Rouyn mine in Saskatchewan. He says Steen is hard-nosed and stubborn. “He’s a no-nonsense guy who knows that the best resources he has are people.”

Steen is a superb technical man, as the record shows. In 1968, Anglo Rouyn copper mine in Saskatchewan, owned by Rio Algom, was struggling. Steen was hired as mine superintendent and found that development lagged the requirements of production. He ordered an immediate ramp- driving program (completed in record time) to access new ore and changed the track operation to trackless, at a time when trackless mining was just barely making inroads in Canadian mines. The quick fix gave the mine another four or five years of productive life.

After the Anglo Rouyn success, Anglo American Corp., a company he had worked for in Zambia, enlisted him again, this time to solve the teething problems of an ailing open pit copper mine-turned-underground- operation, near Whitehorse, Y.T. Things were progressing reasonably well on Steen’s arrival. A shaft was being sunk. But poor ground conditions had stalled a ramp-driving project for more than three months. To get past the 12 ft of weak ground that in Steen’s words had the consistency of “you-know-what through a goose,” Steen had steel rails driven through the poor ground along the back and sides of the drift. That provided the needed support and, within 10 days, the ramp-driving resumed. Under his continued guidance, the mine came into production under budget and ahead of schedule. It produced until 1982.

Perhaps his biggest challenge was turning the corner for Cassiar Asbestos. Asbestos production had begun at Cassiar in 1954. By 1973, however, it became apparent that disaster might befall the operation as early as 1976 if major development work, including a huge waste stripping project, weren’t undertaken immediately. Brian Pewsey, the mine superintendent at the time, recalls the day he and Steen stood at the top of the pit. Pewsey’s recommendation was to shut down the mine and begin stripping right from the top of the pit. Knowing full well the gravity of the situation, Steen could still joke. He turned to Pewsey and said: “I brought you here to fix the operation, not shut it down.”

Kana believes that Steen “in many ways, was involved in starting a new phase for Cassiar,” which up until then had had a fairly trouble-free history. At a total capital cost in the order of $100 million, according to Kana’s estimates, Cassiar moved millions of tons of waste rock, bought bigger earth- moving equipment, built an aerial ore tramline connecting the pit to the mill, and installed a new air system for a mill that had been recognized as a health hazard to workers. It was Cassiar’s (and Steen’s) good fort une that asbestos prices soared during the mid-1970s. Waste removal in the past had been deferred because of a prolonged price slump.

Steen was born on a remote farm in South Africa and, by necessity, was trooped off to boarding school from the age of seven on. He was a good student and an avid rugby player. Plans to join the army and obtain a military- financed degree after high school were scotched by his father when a new government, loathed by the elder Steen, was voted into power. So Steen chose to sign on as a trainee official with Rand Mines’ Blyvooruitzicht (“Happy Outlook” in Afrikaans). Miners were chasing a 6-in, gold-bearing reef that dipped 22 at 7,000 ft below surface. Openings were 36 to 40 inches high. Recalls Steen: “It wasn’t the most pleasant place in the world to work.”

The lure of travel and the dawning awareness that only a university degree would lead to a prosperous future convinced Steen to enter Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, England. In 1956, less than four years after entering Camborne, Steen the mining engineer was hired as a shift boss at Anglo American Corp.’s Rhokana copper complex in Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia). He rose steadily through the ranks and, by 1968, held the post of mine superintendent in charge of three underground mines and an open pit.

Pewsey believes Steen gained much of his superb technical and operating know-how from working in Zambia’s Copper Belt. “It was a magnificent training ground,” he says.

The connection that eventually led to Corona began back at Cassiar, when Steen met Ned Goodman, who was chairman of Campbell Resources at the time and a founding partner of investment counselling firm Beutel Goodman. Steen was later hired (after a stint with Inspiration Resources) by Beutel Goodman to conduct, along with Beutel, Goodman vice-president Pierre Lassonde, an ecomonic analysis of the Faro, Y.T., lead/zinc operation. That work led directly to Goodman’s suggestion that Steen become president of Royex Corp., which in 1985 was still a subsidiary of Campbell. Steen climbed on board once Goodman assured him that Royex, a company without cash flow, could survive until its International Corona equity holding started generating operating profits. Steen also became president of International Corona.

Steen moved swiftly to put International Corona’s house in order. He placed the Cullaton Lake property on care-and-maintenance; boosted the company’s interest in the David Bell mine (co-owned with Teck Corp) to 50% from 45%, in the process, taking a more active role in mine operation; brought back on track “an over- ambitious expansion program” at the partially-owned Renabie mine; and put in reasonable order the mounds of documents relating to the Williams mine lawsuit against LAC Minerals.

He also assembled an experienced operations team, many of whom worked under Steen in the past. Of this team, Steen says, the chemistry is right.

Steen says the secret to managerial success lies in hiring the right people and then treating them well. “Once you get good people — the right operators, public relations and
finance people — then it’s relatively easy.” Of his rather quick ascension to the executive suite, he says luck and chance had something to do with it. He was overawed when the first managerial posts came along, and he was filled with self-doubt. “You wonder if you can handle it.” But nothing beats on-the-job training. “The best way is by being put under pressure, being forced to do something. You might find yourself in situations where you don’t really know the answers. But you have to test things, stick your neck out.”

A committed delegator of tasks, Steen learned early that novice managers must fight the tendency to centralize. “You have to give people a mandate and let them carry it out.” The company (companies rather, because he became president of International Corona and Royex at the same time) that he w as put in charge of in 1985 is a far cry from the Corona of today. Back then, there was no cash flow. Later, International Corona/ Royex grew into a tangled series of inter-corporate holdings that included the two previously mentioned companies and Mascot Gold Mines, Galveston Resources, and Lacana Mining. Today, all have been merged under the Corona Corp. umbrella, thanks to the financial acumen of Goodman and Steen’s managerial know-how. If Corona wins final control of the Williams mine, the company will produce an annual 600,000 oz of gold in 1989. It’s a gold major with nine producing mines (and more on the way), an industrial minerals division, a finger in oil and gas through Poco Petroleums, and a one-third interest in the mine financing house known as Prime Capital.

Corona’s honorary chairman, Murray Pezim, is the wheeler-dealer behind Prime, and perhaps the last word on Steen should go to him. Pezim has battled Steen in the past, as, for example, in 1987 when Pezim launched a late-innings bid to regain control of International Corona (see accompanying story). They have patched up their differences and, today, Pezim is a Steen supporter. “I’ve had my tussles with him,” Pezim tells The Northern Miner Magazine. “But we’ve resolved all that. I can’t talk highly enough about Peter. He’s a typical South African. He’s tough, though he’s mellowed a bit. Nobody is going to push Peter around and he’s not a `yes man’ to Ned Goodman or anybody else.”