Consolidated Gold Fields a Centenary Portrait
Author: Paul Johnson
Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Edition: First 1987
ISBN: 0 297 78967 8
Language: English
Condition: Good. Clean copy with tight binding.
Binding: Hardcover with dustjacket
Pages: 255. Print with images
Additional Information
From the cover: Consolidated Gold Fields is a mining finance company creating wealth and jobs across the world. In this dramatic portrait of a remarkable organisation, Paul Johnson, the historian and political commentator, has written a fascinating study of a unique venture. This is by no means a conventional company history but rather an impression of a vigorous, living organism at one particular moment in its existence. By examining Gold Fields role and purpose Paul Johnson illuminates important, even crucial, questions for industrial society today. How, for example, is industry financed? How does such a company as Gold Fields decide where to invest and in what? How are commercial decisions influenced by political, economic and social considerations?
Above all, Gold Fields is concerned with people. Its assets are of value only because of its employees. Mining, not just of gold, but of every metal and mineral, is a dangerous, back-breaking and often heart-breaking business. Persuading the earth to give forth of its riches requires men and women of exceptional ability, integrity and initiative. It is the people who make Gold Fields the company it is today.
Gold Fields origins lie in South Africa, where that great empire builder Cecil Rhodes and his partner, Charles Rudd, saw the potential for centralising many small claims on the reef under one umbrella and investing hitherto undreamt of sums of money in mining efficiently and scientifically. Now Gold Fields invests in or owns companies as far apart as Chipping Sodbury in England, Mesquite in California, and Perth in Western Australia.
The story of Gold Fields gives the lie to the idea that investment in industry is a dull business of boardroom decisions made a long way from the front line. Investing in industry is a risky, occasionally dangerous business which involves close cooperation between people at every level and using the skill and determination of pioneers no less individualistic than Rhodes himself.
Paul Johnson travelled the world to compile this vivid portrait of a complex and influential company at work making decisions which in the long term will affect us all.
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