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American Steel by Richard Preston

"A failure is a particularly dangerous time for a company, and must be handled with great skill. If people at higher levels come down on an employee and say, 'You goofed up,' it can kill all initiative at a company."

"So how do you handle someone who does goof?" I asked.

Aycock [a senior officer of Nucor] put his hands flat on his desk and eyed me in a way that suggested he thought I was an idiot. "You give him something new to do!" he said in a flaring voice. "Because they're the only damn people in the company who dare take any risks! I'm talkin' personal risks!"

An inspiring book about Nucor, an unusual steel company that managed to thrive at the very time the steel industry in the USA was dying. Burdened by high labor costs, high overhead and sclerotic bureaucracy, most of the major steel companies in the United States died off or washed through bankruptcy in the 1980s and 1990s. Nucor was a stark exception: non-union, flexible, lean, and almost no layers of management.

This book follows Nucor's seat-of-the-pants startup of a new, technologically superior kind of steel plant, chronicling all the hiccups, industrial accidents and even accidental deaths that occur in this dangerous but critical industry. 

One of the key themes in this book is the risk of not taking enough risk, the primary sin of the establishment steel industry in the USA, the very industry that Nucor obliterated with its aggressive (some would say reckless) initiative and risk taking.

Up there with Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" in terms of quality: this book is well paced, well-written and really brings to life all the various characters who make up Nucor, from the CEO right down to the hard-drinking hot metal men (and women) working in the mill. 

American Steel also left this reader feeling mournful for the lively, aggressive, can-do manufacturing culture that the USA seems to have largely lost, perhaps permanently. Today we'd call a lot of the anecdotes in this book toxic masculinity, and we'd shake our heads at the personalities in this book--while enjoying our soy lattes in buildings constructed from steel imported from other countries.

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