What's in a name? What, in particular, is metals management' all about?
I suspect that my ' colleagues assumed that I would have a good answer,
given that the endowed Sandoz Chair I occupied from 1992 until my
retirement in 2000 was entitled "Environment and Management", and at
INSEAD I created a Center for Management of Environmental Resources
(CMER). Metals are a subset of resources, et voila! However, in all
honesty, management, as such, was never my core competence (to use
another phrase popularized by business schools). Here comes the shocking
secret. We used the word management in those titles because INSEAD is a
business school where everything has to have an application to business.
For my colleagues at INSEAD management is what we supposedly teach. Good
management, they (we) think, distinguishes successful enterprises from
unsuccessful ones. For some of our graduates, management is what they
give professional advice to corporate clients about. For the rest of our
graduates it is the umbrella word that describes their choice of career.
The implication conveyed by our choice of words is that metals can be
regarded as one category of environmental resources, and that
resources - including environmental resources - can be managed, in
somewhat the same way that a corporation can be managed. It is not even
too far-fetched to suggest that long run sustainability might be a
management problem.
