Global Macrotrends and Their Impact on Supply Chain Management: Strategies for Gaining Competitive Advantage

10. Mitigating Supply-Driven Imbalance

Gold.

Just the sound of the word is enough to captivate us with grandiose fantasies of power and wealth. Gold’s rare and unique properties have made it one of mankind’s most desired treasures throughout our history. People have hoarded it, traded it, killed for it—and some scientists even found an efficient way to capture more of it. In late 1890s Colorado Springs, a fledgling city nestled in the western Rocky Mountains near the Cripple Creek gold fields, a shrewd businessman named Spencer Penrose formed a partnership with an innovative metallurgist named Charles M. MacNeill. The problem faced by these partners was how to extract a higher percentage of gold from the very hard Cripple Creek ore. Bankrolled ...