LAST MONTH Cynthia Carroll, chief executive of the Anglo American mining company, flew to South Africa to meet ministers and officials, including President Thabo Mbeki. There were big items on the agenda.

On coming to power, the ruling ANC party had changed South Africa’s mining regime so that old-fashioned “private” rights, which Anglo relied on for 40% of its turnover, would revert to the state.

The situation was fraught with risk. The giant mining group, the eighth-biggest company in the FTSE 100 and one of the world’s biggest producers of platinium, diamonds, nickel, coal, iron ore and gold, risked losing the heart of its business in May next year.

The issue had loomed over Anglo since 2002. When Carroll took over last year, she was surprised to find little progress had been made on either side. Relations with the South African government were, as Carroll puts it, “broken”. “We had been working on it for four years before I showed up and we didn’t have much to show for it. It was kind of evident we were spinning our wheels,” she said.

Carroll, an American brought in to run a company previously led by timeserving South African males, made fixing the relationship one of her priorities.

While the leaders of the rival big four miners - BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Vale and Xstrata - have been seized by takeover mania, she has concentrated on the negotiations and on a far-reaching internal shake-up aimed at revitalising the group.

Although the meeting with Mbeki was important, it was only part of a wider offensive. Anglo executives have sought an understanding with ministers and mining officials, and in the past 12 months Anglo has signed eight deals under South Africa’s Black Economic Empow-erment Scheme, designed to hand ownership and management of companies to the black majority. More are on the way.

The pay-off came when analysts and reporters turned up 10 days ago for the annual results presentation. To their surprise, they found a member of the South African government, deputy finance minister Jabu Moleketi, ready to speak alongside Carroll. Senior mining and energy officials were also on hand.

Moleketi had skipped South Africa’s budget day to be there. It was a coup for Anglo, and helped send the company’s share price scooting up on the day.

“It was fantastic. It was unprecedented, actually,” said Carroll.

Unprecedented is normal for Carroll, one of the few women to have made it to the top in the male-dominated mining world. She went into the business almost by accident, choosing to take geology at university when her course required a science paper.

Having grown up in Philadelphia, she began her career at Amoco, the oil group. But in 2006 she was running a large part of Alcan, the aluminium maker, when she bumped into Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Anglo’s chairman, at Davos.

Anglo – founded in 1917 when Sir Ernest Oppenheimer persuaded Herbert Hoover, later the 31st US president, to invest in South African mines - was in something of a slump at the time. Over the years it had spread into other areas, including paper, packaging and aggregates.

It lost the crown as the world’s largest mining group when BHP merged with Billiton in 2001, and then its share-price performance fell behind those of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, despite enjoying the biggest resources boom of all time, as demand from China and India drove up the prices of nickel, iron ore, platinum and gold, all Anglo’s stock in trade. In the words of one insider, it had “lost the will to win”.

When he met Carroll, Moody-Stuart was looking for a replacement for chief executive Tony Trahar, who was leaving after having begun a break-up. Mondi, the paper and packaging arm, was being spun off as a new London-listed company. Speculation was rife in the mining world as to who might replace him. Nobody dreamt that Carroll was a contender.

Her outsider status may have been a blessing in disguise. Anglo had grown up as a collection of businesses, with many of its major interests operated at arm’s length. It is, for example, the major shareholder in the De Beers diamond empire, holding a 45% stake. This is managed separately from the rest of the group.

Carroll wants to change all that. Company presentations are now peppered with references to “One Anglo” - begging the question of how many there were before.

“It [One Anglo] translates into being able to go into any of our operations and know that it belongs to Anglo,” she said.

Carroll cites a trip to Japan last summer, where she discovered the group had been sending representatives from all its different businesses to see each customer independently.

“We brought our major customers together – about 130 of them – and representatives from the various business units. That was a first.”

All the Anglo businesses now meet regularly to share tips on safety, mining techniques and business practice. “They said, Cynthia, a year ago this would never have happened.”

Anglo executives are having to change their attitude. After years of instructions from above, they are being asked to show initiative.

“Because [Anglo] grew up in South Africa, there was a mind-set that people would just wait to be told what to do. I’m looking for people to act as leaders,” said Carroll.

That means ditching old ways of doing things. Not long after arriving, Carroll was presented with a plan to invest in a new iron-ore project. The executives who brought it to her included only one forecast for iron-ore prices. Carroll was not impressed.

“It was an incredible learning experience for everyone involved,” she said, showing her time in Britain has given her a talent for euphemism.

So did she find Anglo a bit backward? Carroll hesitated. “Yes, a little bit, given the size of the company.”

Anglo’s size is one reason why she doesn’t feel any pressing need to join the industry’s merger merry-go-round.

World mining is in the middle of what could be its biggest consolidation ever, with BHP Billiton trying to engineer a hostile takeover of Rio Tinto, and Brazil’s Vale cosying up to Xstrata. Supporters of the deals argue that big is undeniably beautiful when it comes to mining.

Carroll is not so sure. “We are the eighth-largest company in the FTSE 100 – how much larger do we have to be? We are big enough to attract the right talent and fund the right projects.

“Combining BHP and Rio would be challenging in a significant way. To be successful and capture all the value and all the synergies that are talked about– that will take a number of years.”

Asked if she had come close to a deal with Xstrata last year, Carroll did a passable imitation of Margaret Thatcher. “No. No,” she said, looking shocked at the suggestion.

Nor do her shareholders want to get involved. “Our investors have called us and wanted to talk to me directly and make sure about this,” she said. “We have so much value to create in this organisation.

“That is where my focus is, and to be distracted by something else would be wrong.”

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