The data alchemists
- John Bessant
- Mar 7
- 2 min read
How an entrepreneurial couple helped start a retail revolution
A gold ingot about the size of an older generation smartphone weighs 1kg, 2.2 lbs. To make it requires at least a million times that weight in ore, often a great deal more. That raw material doesn’t look particularly promising — it’s plain old boring rock, grey or brown with, if you’re lucky, some tiny tell-tale flecks of glistening yellow. But there is a lot of it about; gold comes from a variety of ores , often embedded in rocks like quartz which can be found anywhere on earth. Most of which is discarded in the extensive process of refining the metal, left in mountains of yellowing rock.
There may be great value in what finally comes out of all of this but getting to that shiny soft and heavy metal requires a lot of effort. The idea of lucky prospectors panning for gold and finding a pure clean nugget glinting away below the surface of the water is as far from reality as the presence of unicorns dipping their mythical heads to drink from the stream.
That doesn’t mean gold mining isn’t worth doing; that ingot is worth around $100,000 at today’s prices. But it does focus our attention on the importance or finding ways to mine and process the precious metal as effectively as possible. A kind of alchemy, transmuting base material into something of great value.
Which is what a couple of entrepreneurs started doing thirty years ago, developing tools and techniques for refining something similarly unprepossessing into a resource increasingly prized around the world. Knowledge.
Much like the raw ore which carries the high value of gold we have mountains of data available in various forms. The trick is to turn that unpromising source into high value knowledge of the kind which increasingly fuels economic growth and underpins effective decision-making in our organizations.
And a video version here
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