One year after 33 miners were trapped deep inside a mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, their dramatic rescue is being celebrated in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

By Christopher Connell | Special Correspondent | 05 August 2011

Washington — One year after the world’s attention was riveted on the fate of 33 miners trapped deep inside a mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, their dramatic rescue is being celebrated in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and studied by academics as “a lesson for the ages” in leadership.

The bravery of the miners themselves made them national celebrities and gave some of them new careers as motivational speakers. Four traveled to Washington to preview the August 4 opening of the Against All Odds exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History that features one of the red rescue capsules, a miner’s hat and boots, a Chilean flag autographed by the 33 miners and a piece of the copper-and-iron ore they were digging 701 meters underground.

But it is the leadership exhibited above ground during the miners’ 69-day ordeal by then-Mining Minister Laurence Golborne that is the primary subject of a case study now used in business administration and executive education classes at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

At the time of the mine collapse, Golborne, an engineer and former executive of the supermarket/retail chain Cencosud S.A., was new on the job and had no experience in mining. But he took charge immediately, enlisting expertise from governments and private companies throughout Chile, the United States, South Africa and elsewhere.

Golborne was a constant presence at the mine, meeting with families as often as every two hours, facing the media and making decisions about where and how to drill boreholes and, later, the rescue shaft.

“He didn’t shrink from decisions, but he didn’t micromanage either,” said Michael Useem, a professor of management, director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, and co-author of the study with Rodrigo Jordán and Matko Koljatic of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. The government didn’t own the mine, “but Golborne was willing to step forward and take responsibility for resolving the crisis,” Useem said. Golborne also could marshal “extraordinary resources,” including engineers from NASA, the U.S. space agency, who advised the Chilean navy on building the Phoenix rescue capsules. Useem called it “a lesson for the ages” in leadership.

Jordán, an adjunct professor and entrepreneur who has scaled Mount Everest and whose company, Vertical S.A., provides outdoor leadership education, said he admired Golborne’s “ability to read not only the technical situation of rescuing the miners, but also … the relational map with all the stakeholders.”

“He arrived there on a Saturday. On the Monday, he knew that he had to confront issues with the rescue itself, but also with the families, with his own government, the mining industry, the media,” Jordán said.

Koljatic, a management professor and former business school dean, said Golborne was empowered by Chilean President Sebastián Piñera’s decision “to find the miners at any cost.” Golborne had run businesses with complex tasks, and “the rescue put in place the best analytical skills of a lot of people.”

But Koljatic added, “The rescue team was lucky. The chances of hitting the refuge where the miners were staying were slim.”

Useem impresses on his students not to forget the resilience and teamwork on display at the San José mine. “None of us is ever going to be trapped in a mine,” he said, but the rescue underscored the importance “of building a top team diverse in capabilities and experience.” That’s applicable to running a big company, a community organization or a government ministry of mines, he said.

Golborne, now minister of public works in Chile, speaking in June at Wharton in Philadelphia, emphasized being “on the field” and motivating everyone, from drill operators to engineers, into believing the rescue would work.

Useem used the mine case study with 16 senior managers for MasterCard Worldwide. Susan Ross, a MasterCard human resources leader, said it “drove home the notion of appealing to the head and the heart in order to lead. … [That’s] not something we often think of in the business world.”

But according to Golborne, “What we faced is something everybody faces on a daily basis in their own life. You never know what is going to happen tomorrow. Problems will be smaller or larger, but the issues are the same.”

For more information, see the case study of the Chilean mine rescue (PDF, 150KB) by Useem of the Wharton School and Jordán and Koljatic of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the Wharton School website.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/iipdigital-en/index.html)