`Gordon Forward mini mill competition strategy`

Cultural counterpoint to Bethlehem: blame attaches to *not* trying new things; weekly profit posted on bulletin board; profit-sharing; folding-table "executive dining room." Linked to Eagar's article on leadership: "leaders seek to help others; managers seek to control others."

Well, that's another story in and of itself. Gordon Forward was an MIT PhD. He's a Canadian — I think he was working for one of the big Canadian steel companies, Stelco or Dofasco. He and other people kind of looked at it — and I told you the story, you could buy scrap iron for a hundred dollars a ton, but it cost you two hundred dollars a ton to make cast iron. If you wanted the electric furnace route as opposed to the basic oxygen furnace to melt your steel — a basic oxygen furnace required 70 percent virgin iron ore, blast-furnace hot metal. Electric furnace, you could take all scrap and melt it, but you'd always have impurities, residual elements, and people thought you could never make anything better than rebar. So back in the early '70s, people like Bethlehem Steel, when I was working for it, considered that garbage — slow, low premium, low markup.