Former Teck Resources CEO Don Lindsay Found His Passion in the Most Unlikely Place: The Mining Industry
Since he was a young child, Don Lindsay has had a passion for all things nature. He just couldn’t have known at the time that this deep love would shape the course of his career moving forward.
A big part of this had to do with his parents and his family in general, growing up in Canada. “My parents built a cabin deep in the woods that was very isolated,” Lindsay recalled. “They had to drive along a single lane dirt road for 22 kilometers and then park the car and take a small boat and cross a 5-kilometer lake to get to it.” Once you were there, you were there. But to him, it was a formative experience.
If you needed to buy milk, for example, you were guaranteed a two-and-a-half-hour trip to get it. Initially, there was no electricity or running water. His parents built their own homemade plumbing system. He spent two full months there every summer — and even though it doesn’t quite sound like the type of experience most people would embrace, it ended up solidifying his love of the great outdoors.
It was in high school that Lindsay found himself with a decision to make. His father was a doctor and, upon graduation, the future CEO could continue with higher education and pursue a career along that trajectory. He comes from a long line of physicians so, at least on the surface, this made sense. Or, he could become an engineer and eventually go into business.
He ultimately chose the latter — and came out all the better for it.
“I had a great summer job working in a deep underground uranium mine in northern Saskatchewan,” he said. He “made enough money to pay for the next three years of school. The rest, as they say, is history. That’s how I found myself in mining engineering.”
Don Lindsay: The Rise to the C-Suite
Eventually, Lindsay would go on to become the CEO of Teck Resources Limited — the second-largest seaborne exporter of steelmaking coal in the world, with large businesses in copper, coal, zinc, and energy. The company has operations around the world and is singularly focused in working in the safest, most sustainable manner possible, achieving the top ranking in the world in its industry from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
For someone of his background, it seems like a natural fit. But again, the journey to get to this point wasn’t as cut-and-dried as one might assume.
After graduating from Harvard Business School, Lindsay joined Wood Gundy, which at the time was the premier investment bank in Canada. He came to the company as an entry-level associate. He assumed he’d be staying there for two to three years until he found his true passion — the industry that he truly wanted to work in.
“The reality is I never found my passion,” he shared. “But I thought it was better to keep working than to quit and go find myself or something. I was president 15 years later.”
He was referring to an organization that was at the time referred to as CIBC World Markets. A major bank, CIBC, ended up taking over Wood Gundy. There was a significant amount of consolidation going on in the financial services industry in the late 1980s and suddenly, Don Lindsay found himself as the president of what was then the largest investment bank in Canada.
To his credit, Lindsay has indicated that these years of his life were truly impactful. “As an associate in investment banking, you work in telecom companies or power and utilities or forest products or banks. You see the whole range of things. It’s great exposure and a great education.”
Pre-Internet Globe-Trotting
During this time, Lindsay formed a specialty industry group -— one that focused exclusively on the mining industry. The group had clients all around the world, from Australia to South Africa to New York, Asia, and beyond. This was in the days before the internet boom, so the amount of effort required to create a global franchise such as this one was enormous.
Lindsay and his team members would travel all across the world to find out which organizations were selling copper, which were selling gold, and so on. Then, they’d go back to Toronto, where the company was based, and advise other organizations about what was going on in the marketplace and make suggestions about different strategies they could capitalize on to that end.
This became very successful in a short amount of time. But even though his career was taking a different trajectory than the one he may have expected or even wanted, Don Lindsay maintained his relationships in the mining industry. Eventually, Teck recruited him and there’s been no limit to his success ever since.
Over the years, Don Lindsay’s passion for the mining industry hasn’t waned — and neither has the amount of effort he’s willing to put into that which he loves so much. He strongly believes it’s vital that successful companies are committed to giving back to their communities. In December 2022, for example, Teck made a $5 million donation to the BC Parks Foundation to help provide the resources necessary to enhance and expand its world-class system of parks and protected areas in British Columbia. He has received numerous accolades for his efforts, including earning the Nature Trust of British Columbia Conservation Champion Award in 2014, the CIM Distinguished Service Medal, the Business in Vancouver CEO of the Year Award, and an Outstanding Volunteer Fundraiser Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, among others. He was named to the Order of British Columbia in 2014.
It’s fascinating to think back on how much of this journey is tied directly to that cabin in the woods his parents erected all those years ago: the one that initially didn’t have electricity and that required them to build their own plumbing system. Don Lindsay parlayed his love of that experience into finding his true passion in the mining industry, and he’s proud to be able to say that he hasn’t looked back since.