Gold fever around the world 2011

Gold fever around the world 2011
Gold fever around the world 2011



Alaska
On Dec. 3, Discovery Channel premièred reality show Gold Rush Alaska, which follows suburbanites who risk their lives in search of big gold finds.

Atlanta
Taking a leaf out of Tupperware and Mary Kay books, three Atlanta women founded Golden Girls, a franchise company that organizes in–home gold–buying parties aimed at relieving women of their excess jewelry. In Canada, Golden Girls now competes with Gold Party Princess, Vancouver Gold and GoldSmart Network.

Pompano Beach, Fla.
Just three years old, the leading Internet gold buyer Cash4Gold grossed US$160 million in 2009 and was expected to maintain its 77% growth rate in 2010. It receives up to 20,000 packages a week, and the U.S. Postal Service fielded 1,300 loss complaints in 2008 and 2009 from people claiming they had sent jewelry to the company.

Malartic, Que.
After discovering an untapped deposit underneath this depressed resource town, Osisko Mining Corp. arranged to relocate 200 houses and public buildings to make way for what promises to be Canada's largest open–pit gold mine.

Toronto
Heated competition between two cash–for–gold shops sharing a street corner culminated in charges related to an alleged murder plot and finally arson on Dec. 27, forcing the relocation of Harold the Jewellery Buyer.

Carlstadt, N.J.
Online retailers are doing brisk business selling items such as chemical and electronic gold testers, and Grobet USA's home gold–melting and –casting kilns.

London
SPDR Gold Trust, now the world's second–largest exchange–traded fund, holds about $60 billion worth of gold bullion in vaults scattered around London, the worldwide hub for gold trading.

Berlin
Germany's Gold–to–Go is installing gold–vending machines (or, as it calls them, gold ATMs) that sell coins and small bars in ritzy locations such as the Galeries Lafayette department store in Berlin and the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.

India
The country is the world's largest consumer of gold jewelry, followed by China, Russia and Turkey. The four together account for nearly two–thirds of world demand — which has been dropping in response to gold's rising price.

Shenzhen
Late last year, Lion Fund Management announced plans to launch a bullion ETF, allowing Chinese investors (the world's No. 2 consumers of gold) to buy gold–backed units for the first time.

Boddington, Western Australia
Dozens of hard–rock gold mines and placer operations around the world previously considered exhausted have reopened in recent years, including the Boddington mine.

Business around the World

Business around the World
Business around the World
Business around the World

While many history departments of American universities prefer to keep business as a separate discipline, HBS entrepreneurship professor Geoffrey Jones encourages the examination of history as a way to better understand contemporary management issues.

To that end, Jones and Franco Amatori, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan, co-edited Business History around the World (Cambridge University Press 2004), a report on the current state of business history worldwide. Recently Jones took time to explain the importance of this new book, to which he also contributed chapters.

Cynthia Churchwell: What inspired your work analyzing the study of business history around the world?

Geoffrey Jones: There were two main factors driving our desire to bring together this survey of the current state of business history worldwide.

First, there has been an explosive growth of research over the last decade. Ten years ago our knowledge of the history of business was heavily concentrated on the cases of the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Since then there has been exciting new research on the business history of other European countries, especially Italy and Spain, on many Latin American countries, especially Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, and on Chinese-speaking communities. Much of the best research is only available in local languages.

Business historians have also widened their research agendas. Understanding the evolution of the strategies and structures of large manufacturing corporations remains important, but a new generation of researchers has explored business networks, the family firm, knowledge creation and transfer, public policy and business, and a host of other topics. We wanted to bring together this new literature and perspectives and make it accessible, in English, to a broader audience.

Additionally, we felt that the moment was opportune for such a survey because the discipline of business history is at a crossroads. There are some researchers who wish the subject to be embedded firmly within the discipline of history, and to address the primary concerns of that discipline. In the United States, many history departments are currently heavily concerned with topics relating to culture, ethnicity, and gender. There is often an unwillingness to relate these important topics to business. Other scholars, including myself, perceive of business history as playing a central role in enhancing our understanding of key issues in contemporary management and business administration. The book provides a position statement of where we are now, which we hope will enrich the debate about the future direction and research agenda of the discipline.

Q: How does this new work differ from your previous research on multinationals?

A: This new book reflects my longstanding interest in the diversity of the business past. Much of my own research has been concerned with the historical evolution of multinationals. However, although research on this topic has often focused on high technology manufacturing companies, I have written extensively on the service sector, on business groups and alliances rather than hierarchical corporations, and on the different ways the entrepreneurs and firms of different countries have pursued strategies and organized their businesses. The contributors to this new book bring out this rich diversity on a much broader canvass.

Q: What have you learned about the success and impact of businesses around the world?

A: This book shows how entrepreneurs and firms have occupied center stage in driving the wealth of nations. It also demonstrates that there has never been a single model for successful or unsuccessful capitalism.

To give only one example, business and economic historians have often taken a skeptical view of the merits of family-owned and -managed firms. Harvard Business School's Alfred Chandler, the doyen of business historians, famously ascribed Britain's relative economic decline to the United States from the late nineteenth century to that country's proclivity towards family or "personal capitalism." This was contrasted with the separation of ownership and control and the growth of professional management seen in the United States. That debate continues. But this book does report compelling research that shows that, historically, family ownership and management in many countries has been a dynamic force. Leading firms such as Michelin in France, Heineken in the Netherlands, or Cargill or Mars in the United States are the tip of a huge iceberg of successful and long-lived family firms worldwide. Even today around a third of Fortune 500 companies are family controlled.