BETHLEHEM STEEL VS. NUCOR by Jim Collins

“Compare Bethlehem Steel to Nucor. Both companies operated in the steel industry and produced hard-to-differentiate products. Both companies faced the competitive challenge of cheap imported steel. Yet executives at the two companies had completely different views of the same environment. Bethlehem Steel’s CEO summed up the company’s problems in 1983 by blaming imports: ‘Our first, second, and third problems are imports.’ Ken Iverson and his crew at Nucor considered the same challenge from imports a blessing, a stroke of good fortune. (‘Aren't we lucky; steel is heavy and they have to ship it all the way across the ocean, giving us a huge advantage!’). Iverson saw the first, second, and third problems facing the American steel industry not to be imports, but management. He even went so far as to speak out publicly against government protection against imports, telling a stunned gathering of fellow steel executives in 1977 that the real problems facing the American steel industry lay in the fact that management had failed to keep pace with innovation.”