INSIDER MAGAZINE: How Lynas Rare Earths’ Amanda Lacaze became queen of the corporate turnaround

What does it take to become the queen of corporate turnarounds? Lynas Rare Earths boss Amanda Lacaze puts much of it down to an ability to be decisive, to think outside the box and a willingness to listen to colleagues who know the business inside out — but then ultimately form your own opinion. Combined with a childhood star chart incentivising good behaviour (with no less than seven categories of performance), such qualities are a recipe for success — namely, becoming the chief executive of an ASX100 listed company. They have helped Lacaze gain a reputation for changing the fortunes of companies, including her current employer. But there is no doubt the Queenslander has a natural flair and thrives under pressure. She is straight-talking but warm and quick-witted, and always impeccably dressed to impress. Lacaze has a range of coloured Swarovski pens to match her wardrobe. Today’s ensemble is an embroidered lilac suit by New Zealand designer Adrienne Winkelmann. A certain commitment to appearance is required for the role but Lacaze has no shame in admitting fashion is — and always has been — an “absolute indulgence” in her life. She fondly remembers shopping at Carla Zampatti with her best friend as first-year university students: “(It was) just ridiculous, frankly.” There are no pretences with Lacaze: what you see is what you get. It is refreshingly honest from a chief executive. Lacaze is good at what she does, and if you’ve got it, why not flaunt it? Behind the “pretty clothes” though is a battle-hardened corporate leader who worked across a wide range of industries before rising to the top job at Lynas, which was valued about $6.28 billion at the time of writing. It did not come without sacrifices. There were times when she was not always “the world’s best dressed CEO” — including the long days and nights as a new mother when she had two babies under 16 months with her husband, Wayne Morgan. The couple later decided Morgan — also a high-flyer with demanding travel commitments for work — would become the primary carer for their three children. “We made the decision that’s right for us — it’s not necessarily right for everyone,” Lacaze says. “There would have been whole days when our kids would have seen neither of their parents. As it was, there were whole days when they didn’t see me, but there were very few days when they didn’t see their father. So I think they appreciate that now they’re all grown up.” Colourful career Lacaze started her career as a marketing graduate at the world’s biggest food company, Nestlé, in 1983. There she learned the fundamentals of business: no matter where you work, “it’s all about the customer”. The experience also taught her the importance of being able to continuously innovate to extend the life-cycle of key products. While coffee, milk and pet food may seem a world apart from Lynas products such as neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) — used in magnets — innovation remains the secret to success. Next came a three-year stint at chemicals company ICI Australia, now Orica and Incitec Pivot, before moving on to Telstra where she was based in Brisbane as managing director of marketing. She remembers her time at the telco as a period of massive change, working through the first couple of tranches of privatisation (known as T1 and T2) and the deregulation of the telecommunications industry. “We also had the introduction of mobile phones and and the internet. We forget this but in 1998 I was still running . . . seminars on ‘what is the internet’.” Lacaze made it her ambition to become a CEO at the age of 22. Unfortunately this was at a time when corporate Australia was even less inclined to trust the fairer sex to lead successful companies, meaning “women weren’t given nice, substantive, stable businesses to run”. “Many of us at that time took on turnarounds or businesses that were in trouble because at that stage it’s sort of like, we’ve tried everything, we might as well give a woman a chance — she can’t do any worse.” A string of even more challenging positions followed. It was either sink or swim. From Telstra, Lacaze landed her first CEO position at AOL7, a broadband joint venture between AOL, Seven Network and AAPT, before becoming executive chairman at Orion Telecommunications and then MD and CEO of Commander Communications. Commander Communications collapsed in 2008 but the other companies survived after turnaround plans led by Lacaze. Rise of Lynas She eventually made her way to the board of Lynas in January 2014. Once again, she was confronted with a company plagued by “quite serious issues”. “Short on money, long on debt and the processing facility (in Malaysia) didn’t work . . . frankly I had to either put my hand up to be part of the solution or I should resign, so I put my hand up,” Lacaze says. “I didn’t do it because I fell in love with mining and rare earths, I did it because the people in the business deserve somebody to actually give it their best shot to fix it.” Lacaze succeeded Eric Noyrez in June, less than six months after being appointed a director and weeks after Lynas raised about $40m from shareholders to counter rising liquidity concerns. She threw herself into the challenge. The family moved to Kuantan, on Malaysia’s east coast, where Lacaze focused on making the plant more efficient and renegotiating Lynas’ debt with Japanese lenders. Lynas’ future today is undoubtedly more secure. The company is the biggest supplier of rare earths outside of China — an enviable position as countries seek to diversify supply chains. Lynas reported a net profit of $310.7 million in the year to June 30 and a cash balance of $1 billion, giving it plenty of firepower for growth. Rare earths, considered essential for the energy transition, can be used to make high-strength magnets for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. They are also important components in technology such as smart phones, computers and medical imaging. But there are still challenges ahead as Lynas races to finish its Kalgoorlie cracking and leaching plant by the end of the year — the cost of which has blown out by $230m to $730m. The company is under the pump to get the Kalgoorlie plant up and running before December 31 amid concern its equivalent facility in Malaysia may have to be partly wound down from January next year. The Malaysian Government led by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is worried about low-level radioactive waste left behind from the cracking and leaching process. It has demanded Lynas move that process offshore as part of strict licence conditions. Lynas has been granted a six-month extension to its operating licence in the country to January 2024 but could be forced to stop processing after then if its appeal through the Malaysian courts is not successful. The contentious licence conditions it is fighting ban the import and processing of rare earths from its Mt Weld mine in WA. The concerns are not new for Lynas. The company has been operating in Malaysia for more than a decade, during which time four scientific reviews have found its operations to be safe, low risk and compliant with all regulations. Lacaze remains positive on the task ahead. She embraces the attitude of her late grandad, Christian Aird, that “every day is a good day” and brings new opportunities, even in the face of adversity. “Every single time we’ve been found to be intrinsically low risk and compliant with all regulations. So when we have to deal with a new politician who thinks they’re going to get somewhere from attacking Lynas, it’s a little bit like groundhog day,” she says. “But if it wasn’t that, it would be something else.” The benefit of experience is knowing what has and hasn’t worked, Lacaze says, and realising an approach that may have failed previously could yield a different result today. “You actually need to retain the ability to be able to say, if I did that five years ago it didn’t work but it might work today,” she explains. “If you have diversity — not just gender but age and experience in your organisation, particularly young people — they don’t know what didn’t work. Our job as leaders is to listen to them and say, well maybe we should just give that another shot, maybe we didn’t execute it well last time, maybe the conditions just weren’t quite right. “I get very frustrated when I hear people dumping on young people and saying they don’t want to work hard. We’ve got a lot of young people in this business who work really hard and are really valuable.” Critical minerals support While conditions are more challenging in Malaysia, Lynas has been welcomed with open arms in the US. The Biden administration in August more than doubled funding towards construction of Lynas’ heavy rare earths refinery in Texas from $US120 million to $US258m. While the funding is not linked to the US Government’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is luring a wave of investments via generous tax subsidies, Lacaze says Lynas was more than willing to help the Government in its ambition to onshore the processing of heavy rare earths. The project will be the only large-scale producer of separated heavy rare earths outside of China once completed, sourcing feed from the Mt Weld and Kalgoorlie operations. “Americans in business have a much higher risk profile than Australians in business, and it actually pays dividends,” Lacaze says. She notes there has been little movement from the Australian Government on advancing the local critical minerals industry despite calls for more funding and policy support that followed the release of a new strategy in June which provided an extra $500m for downstream processing. Lacaze has encouraged governments to spend more on building infrastructure to support companies in the rapidly growing industry. And like many other mining bosses, Lacaze has taken issue with the Albanese Government’s industrial relations agenda — particularly the “same job, same pay” proposal. The policy would require employers to pay labour hire workers at least the same pay as direct employees doing the same job. It is designed to stop employers from using labour hire arrangements to avoid paying wages and conditions achieved through genuine enterprise bargaining. Lacaze is concerned about “unintended consequences” from the policy and says it is worth remembering the average mining salary is $150,000 a year. She maintains that only Lynas staff share the same measure of success and objectives. “We all win or lose together.” No to work-life balance Lacaze becomes irritated when people ask her how she maintains a “work-life balance”. To her, it implies work is not part of life. “They are not competing activities,” she stresses. “People who work have purpose, they have pride, self-esteem. People who don’t work often have a lot of other challenges. This is not a competition between work and life — they actually go together.” Outside of a packed schedule that involves frequent visits to Malaysia and Kalgoorlie, she enjoys spending time with her family. She is proud to have recently become a first-time grandmother to a granddaughter living in Sweden and has been busy working on her daughter to move back home. Lacaze keeps herself fit by going to the gym and is also musical. As a child she learned piano, violin and flute, even securing an associate diploma in music from Trinity College in London. “I keep busy, except for when I’m not, and then I just veg. You need some recovery time, so it’s that combination and giving yourself permission to do that sometimes I think is quite important.” Reaching for the stars Born the fourth of five children and preceded by three brothers, the Lacaze household was ruled by a star chart on the fridge with seven categories of performance rewarded with gold, silver or bronze stickers. The first, “studies”, contained a note underneath written by their late mother Joan: “Anything less than your best will not qualify.” There was also “cultural improvement”, comprising music, art and reading and requiring a minimum of one book or one piece of music each week, “current affairs”, requiring they read newspapers and listen to broadcasts and others before vigorous debates at dinner each night, “creative development”, or thinking up new ideas, “daily chores” and “religious activities”. “The final line is pray if it depends on God and work if it depends on you,” Lacaze recalls. Along with helping stay out of trouble, the star chart helped Lacaze cultivate the skills needed to become a leader. “If we were corporatising this, it provides a very clear articulation of vision. It provides clear objectives and examples of how to execute,” she says. “Thinking up new ideas and using your own plans for original results is probably at the heart of why I have been able to be successful as a leader of corporate turnarounds.” Lacaze has fond memories of her time at St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School in Brisbane, an institution she credits with “preparing young women so they are able to address the world with confidence unencumbered by notions of gender”. Her father, Peter Lacaze, also played an important role in instilling confidence from a young age — a quality she has in abundance. At a time when it was “not particularly fashionable”, he told her she could do whatever she set her mind to. “He told the whole world at large that I was smarter than the three LBWs — living bloody wonders, that’s my three brothers — put together,” says Lacaze, who remembers her father as the “life of the party”. “He also told the whole world at large that I was his princess. So I think whether we like to accept it or not, girls do derive a lot of their self-esteem from the way their fathers treat them. The fact that he told me how beautiful and how clever and how talented I was probably has fed into my confidence.” Gender parity remains an ongoing struggle among Australia’s top companies even today. It could take 50 years to achieve gender parity in CEO roles if current “glacial” progress continues, according to recent data from Chief Executive Women. Lacaze is one of about 27 female CEOs in the ASX300, based on analysis from the latest available CEW figures. She believes while corporate Australia is gaining a greater appreciation for the value of diversity, significant change won’t occur without clear measures “and indeed even quotas”. Diversity is one of the key drivers of success at Lynas and goes further than gender, Lacaze says, noting there are some 10 different nationalities in the first two layers of management and employees from all walks of life. “Until people actually see that the value of diversity is that you can run your business to deliver better outcomes, I think it’s difficult to get a sustainable change,” she says.