This story is about a Canadian Gold mining company, a contracting gold market and a keystone mine in Ontario called GoldCorp. Rob McEwen, the CEO of the company was quite a maverick. He came up with a lot of ideas, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. In the year 2000, their main mine had started drying up, the gold market was shrinking, the prices were plummeting. When Goldcorp had first started struggling with debt, McEwen had taken the bold thought suicidal-step of ramping up exploration instead of winding it down. The gamble seemed to pay off. A lode of gold was detected in the depths of the Ontario mine that was thought to dwarf the existing deposits. But subsequent efforts failed to pin down the location and value of the gold, and it was back to square one. Around that time, McEwen attended a conference, and here he heard about the software called Linux, the one created by Linus Torvalds. He heard how because Torvalds had opened the software to the world, and allowed programmers and experts from across the world to look at the code, everyone would give great ideas and make it even better. This was an epiphany for Rob. He came back and announced that he was going to open up 50 years worth of data for people around the world and ask people to try and see if they could use the data to find the gold. Obviously, there was backlash and all the advisors were against it. McEwen knew that his geologists were sceptical, if not downright worried, about what he was proposing. And he couldn’t blame them. He was asking them to go against a sacred tenet of mining and share 50 years worth of the Canadian company’s precious geological data with the world, to allow pretty much anyone to trawl through the information for clues as to the whereabouts of as-yet-undiscovered gold deposits. It went against every mining convention, it was enormously risky, but true to form, McEwen was determined to do it. And so, in 2000, overriding the protests of his employees, the CEO launched the Goldcorp Challenge, which dangled prize money of half a million dollars in front of the participants. McEwen was floored by the results. Over 1000 people from 50 countries-not just geologists but also programmers, mathematicians, consultants and others-used their expertise to identify 50 new sites in the grounds of the Ontario mine. Amazingly, over three-quarters of them yielded significant gold deposits. Within 7 years, 8 million ounces of the precious metal was mined by Goldcorp at those sites, and several years worth of exploration time had been saved. Following in the footsteps of Linus Torvalds, McEwen had dispensed with the old, slow, secretive way of doing things and embraced open collaboration, harnessing the intelligence and enthusiasm of new colleagues. What a fantastic event to share! Business Points ( Tags ) #Creativethinking #Outofboxthinking #Outsidelooking #in #Persistence #GoldMines #Ontario #Linux #Linus #Torvalds
