Ford Motor Company executive dining room hamburger story

Anecdotal evidence of management-class extravagance at mid-1970s Bethlehem Steel: peach-sized strawberries in the executive dining room, three Lear jets ferrying VPs to Florida golf weekends. Used to set up the structural argument about why Bethlehem's management failed.

At Homer Research when I was there, we had the corporate dining room, which was on a second floor with huge windows looking out on the vista of the steel mill. You could see the smog from the coke ovens over here, and the pollution from the blast furnace over here. They had an executive dining room, which I snuck into once at about 2:30 in the afternoon, just to say I'd been in there. This is where the big shots, like the Don Trautleins, would eat lunch. I remember seeing a strawberry the size of a peach. I thought, this is amazing, it was going into the executive dining room. If I told you all the stories of how the upper management took care of themselves — I lived near the airport, and they had three Lear jets which would fly the vice presidents down to Florida in the winter to play golf on the weekends. This is good corporate management in the United States circa 1975, which is one of the reasons that after 13 months I said, where do I want to be in 5 years? And the clear answer was, not at Bethlehem Steel. So I left and came back here.