American Steel

Preston followed Nucor's construction of the Crawfordsville, Indiana plant in the late 1980s, the first commercial mill to cast thin slabs of steel continuously and roll them directly into sheet. He had access to the engineers, the operators and the company's leadership during construction and start-up.

The technical claim is the centre of the book. Integrated steelmakers made flat-rolled sheet by casting thick slabs, letting them cool, reheating them and rolling them down through a long mill, a process requiring enormous capital and scale. Nucor bought an unproven German design from SMS Schloemann-Siemag that cast a slab about two inches thick and fed it directly into rolling while still hot. If it worked, an electric arc furnace mini-mill melting scrap could make sheet steel, which had previously been the exclusive product of integrated producers using iron ore and coke. Preston documents the start-up in detail, including the near-failures, the breakouts of molten steel and the improvisation by the operating crews.

The organisational material is equally specific. Nucor under Ken Iverson ran with four management layers, no corporate staff to speak of, production bonuses that could double a worker's pay and were paid weekly, no separate executive dining rooms or reserved parking, and plant managers with wide autonomy. Preston connects the willingness to bet the company on unproven technology to that structure.

The book is reportage rather than industry analysis, and it stops at start-up. What followed, the widespread adoption of thin-slab casting, the resulting collapse of the integrated producers' position in sheet, and Nucor's growth into the largest American steelmaker, is outside it. The book is also the standard example of how a low-cost entrant moves upmarket into a segment incumbents believed was protected.