When James Graham stepped down from the Coles board, he left behind a curious legacy: a retail giant steered by a powerhouse trio of chemical engineers.
When James Graham AM FIEAust EngExec stepped down from the Coles board in April 2025, he carried with him a curious coincidence. For several years, three of the most senior people steering one of Australia’s largest retail businesses had all trained as chemical engineers.
“I studied chemical engineering at the University of Sydney,” he said. “Steven Cain, our inaugural Coles CEO, was a chemical engineer from Imperial College London. And our former chief financial officer, now CEO, Leah Weckert, is a chemical engineer from the University of Adelaide.”
At first glance, these engineering foundations look far removed from retail. But in practice, they shaped Graham’s approach to business. A long-serving Wesfarmers director from 1998, Graham was appointed Chair of Coles in 2018 from the date of its demerger. He helped guide the company through COVID lockdowns, the sale of Coles Express, the purchase of two food manufacturing businesses, and substantial investments in automation, new technology and store development.
“Coles is an extremely diverse business. We embarked on some of Australia’s most sophisticated automation in distribution and fulfilment centres. These were billion-dollar investments. We needed to understand the technology, the market, the financial risk and commercial dynamics – and understanding multidisciplinary frameworks is what engineers are trained in.”
An early education in complexity
In the third year of his degree, Graham and his classmates were required to take an industrial relations law course in the economics faculty.
“It gave me an appreciation of the interconnectedness of engineering. That broad approach became fundamental to my long-term commercial career.”
He also interned with two “giants of industry at the time”: Unilever in Balmain and Union Carbide at Rhodes.
At Union Carbide, Graham was tasked with increasing production of a heavy industrial chemical used in plastic film.
“They wanted to increase the operational capacity without spending more. But the real challenge was working with the team on that plant. Most had very little formal training, and they were nervous about what they saw as management interference.”
That experience sharpened his understanding of human dynamics.
Then there was a second project: assessing sulphur dioxide emissions from one of the plants. The challenge wasn’t chemical – it was to understand the interface between regulation, community standards and the practical limits of the plant.
Those early experiences – navigating risk, human behaviour, social licence, financial constraints and technical complexity – became the foundational lessons for everything that followed.
By 1969, Graham had finished his degree and went “straight to work” at Dow Chemical selling bulk industrial chemicals to large manufacturing organisations. “That job taught me so much about commerce, marketing and how to take an integrated approach to a product’s life cycle.”
He was then appointed to a team developing Dow’s proposal for a major petrochemical complex in South Australia. Then politics intervened.
“Gough Whitlam came to power, and the new minister for energy and resources said there would be no new major projects for any foreign-owned corporation. Dow was American. We immediately put down our pencils and the project never went ahead.”
That abrupt ending carried a lasting lesson.
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Risk, judgement and the long view
After several years in industry, Graham returned to study, completing a Master of Business Administration that was “complementary to everything I’d learnt as an engineer”. Soon afterwards, he was presented with an opportunity that would change the direction of his career.
“I became employee 18 in what was then a small merchant bank called Hill Samuel,” he said. “Today, it’s known as Macquarie Bank.”
In what he calls “an interesting coincidence and good fortune”, Graham had been in the role for two months when a global consortium approached the bank for advice on establishing a petrochemical industry in Australia. “This time, the focus was on the financial elements rather than the technical and industrial ones I’d dealt with earlier.” This reinforced how readily the engineering mindset can translate into complex commercial work.
In June 2005, Graham was interviewed for Engineers Australia’s magazine. He was quoted as saying: “The insights of technical, market and operational risks learnt from chemical engineering have been a material contributor to my approach to business generally, together with an appreciation for the human dynamics, so well experienced on chemical plant operations.”
Twenty years on, what does he think of this reflection? “More of the same,” he said.
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