Acclaim for Making Steel

KEN iverson: in the presence of greatness

Excerpted from American Metal Market
June 21, 2005
© 2005 American Metal Market

By Scott Robertson

A member of the San Francisco Giants’ baseball team would not have to watch slugger Barry Bonds for very long to realize he was in the presence of greatness. And almost every baseball aficionado would have a relatively easy time defining the legacy of one of the game’s greats.

Defining the legacy of F. Kenneth Iverson, the late chairman and driving force behind the growth of Nucor Corp., Charlotte, N.C., is almost as easy. Iverson hit his share of home runs, most of them in the form of promoting radical technology and in his dealings and relationships with those he met, both inside and outside the Nucor family.

Three years after his death, Iverson’s influence is still clearly seen throughout the steel industry, most notably in this continuing work at Nucor, but also at Steel Dynamics Inc., Fort Wayne, Ind., the proposed Steel-Corr LLC mini-mil project, the merging of International Steel Group (ISG) into what is now Mittal Steel Co. NV, and even at places like U.S. Steel Corp.

Mark Reutter, author of Making Steel, a history of Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s Sparrows Point, Md., plant, puts Iverson in a class with the likes of such steel industry pioneers as Frederick W. Wood.

“I think Iverson was the most important figure in the post-war steel industry," said Reutter, who is business and law editor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “He brought the entrepreneurial spirit back to the industry. I think it’s fair to say he created the post-1980s steel industry. He showed the power of technology to move a mature industry forward. He had that strength and that passion. He was different from the jargon-filled steel executives. His commitment to thin-slab casting and other technology revived the industry.”