Many New Zealand businesses and organisations can learn crucial lessons from the corporate failures underlying the Pike River Coal mine tragedy, Christchurch author and journalist Rebecca Macfie says.
Ms Macfie gave an illustrated talk arising from her recently-published book Tragedy at Pike River, to about 30 people at the Toitu Otago Settlers Museum auditorium on Friday and also commented in an interview.
Twenty-nine miners and contractors died in an explosion at the Pike River Coal mine, 46km northwest of Greymouth, on November 19, 2010.
''I felt it was a stain on our history and I still do,'' she said.
The reality was that 29 lives had been lost, as well as $350 million in investment capital, and all that for only two small shipments of 42,000 tonnes of coal.
This was ''not a very good rate of return''.
The Pike River Coal mine venture had, from the start, been built on a series of ''heroic assumptions'', a mass of mistakes and a lot of ''little white lies''.
The latter had included public statements, which obscured real problems with the mine's's ventilation system, as well as with defective mining equipment and hydrological mining operations.
There had also been a great deal of exaggeration - including a near trebling in the projected annual coal production potential, which the mining firm had never been able to achieve.
The mine had also been promoted with claims it was a leading example of environmentally friendly and ''surgical'' mining, but the reality was totally different. The trouble with hyperbole was that ''once it starts, it's hard to stop''.
''There's a fine line between entrepreneurial zeal and delusion,'' she said.
There had also been a ''fog of mismanagement and dysfunctional bureaucracy'' surrounding the tragedy.
Some people had the view systematic corporate management failures at Pike River were an ''outlier'' with absolutely no relation to the rest of the New Zealand business world.
But there were clear signs of exaggeration, avoiding facing the truth, and a ''culture of arrogance'' in some other businesses and organisations, including failed finance companies.
She believed there was ''a little bit'' of Pike River in many organisations and urged everyone to learn from what had happened and apply it in their workplaces.
She recalled having interviewed some company chief executives who had openly stated they were happy to hire people who were brighter and more knowledgeable than themselves.
But instead of showing this kind of humility and willingness to learn from experienced people, even those in relatively junior positions, Pike River Mine management had shown arrogance and an unwillingness to listen to concerns from rank-and-file workers.
