Chapter 3

How Steel Companies Operate

The primary audience for this book is students in MBA and Executive Education programmes. For this reason, much of the book is directed at issues of management, both within steel companies and more broadly. How do steel companies operate, what motivates executives in charge of them, and how do they manage and coordinate their huge and complicated global operations?

Classic steel companies were operated like huge centrally controlled machines. They had their own iron ore and coal mines, railroads, furnaces, rolling mills, and distribution centers. With this scale and throughput they produced steel products, which in their standard grades, cost less than the price of chicken at the local grocery store. Price ...

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