Armco Steel Houston benchmarking failure (CF&I Pueblo gate-tour anecdote)

I remember a guy I met who had worked for Armco Steel in Houston all his life. I asked him, have you ever done any benchmarking about other steel companies? He says no. The only other steel plant in his entire thirty-year career that he had ever been through was the CF&I plant in Pueblo, Colorado, and he was on vacation, he passed the steel plant and he had some time, so he stopped at the gate and said, hey, I work at Armco Steel in Houston, can I see your plant? So he got a tour of someone else's steel plant. That was the management intelligence of the integrated steel producers around 1980 or 1985. You wouldn't dare tell anybody about what you're doing, because your technology is the best in the world. Your technology is crap. There are other people who have good ideas too. But no, they could never believe something like that.