Sustainable Metals Management

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.