It will doubtless serve Mike Henry well that his executive life has spanned the great contrasts of past and present leadership forged by the secular and cyclical shifts in BHP’s core commodity markets that continue to be released by China’s need to sustain its economic revolution.

BHP’s next chief executive and managing director was invited to executive life in 2011 by a prodigiously clever prophet of audacious growth, Marius Kloppers, and the Canadian marketing guru will inherit his job from a scientist, Andrew Mackenzie, who made shrinking to greatness fashionable.