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Value Cycles

That all things are changed, and that nothing really perishes and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain. —Sir Francis Bacon

The value chain model has long served the needs of business production, but today we know it is built on faulty assumptions about what happens at both ends of the chain. On the upstream, input side of the value chain, the assumption was that inputs would always be abundant and cheap. While prices may fluctuate wildly, global resource demand is trending ever upward. The emergence of middle classes in China and India alone will quickly triple the demand for goods and the natural ...

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