When you go to fancy-pants MBA school, you learn a lot of fancy-pants terms. It’s nice at first to throw them around and sound smart. Kind of justifies the expense of the degree.
But pretty soon you realize they aren’t that meaningful if (a) they really aren’t communicating anything other than you’re a snotty MBA with some fancy-pants terms, and (b) you really don’t know what it means in the first place.
And by means, I’m talking about the experience of driving through the barely-settled hills of Ghana and happening upon a working gold mine.
Towering processing machinery clustered together, the size of ten, maybe twelve city blocks. Caterpillar’s repair facility four stories high, two football fields long. Security check-points like NORAD. Vehicles zipping about in some presumably rational way, creating traffic like the town square of a small Midwestern town. Compounds of mess halls, pool parlors, the bar, and decent motel-like barracks.
And we haven’t even seen the mine. Or its haul trucks. Or drillers. Or excavators.
Maybe this is what my finance professor meant by Capital Intensive.